Television Network Embeds Android Device In Magazine Ads 115
Revotron writes "Readers of Entertainment Weekly might be shocked to find their magazine is a good bit heavier than normal this week. US-based broadcaster CW placed an ad in Entertainment Weekly which uses a fully-functional 3G Android device, a T-Mobile SIM card, and a specialized app to display short video advertisements along with the CW Twitter feed. Writers at Mashable were willing to geek out with a Swiss Army knife and a video camera to give us all the gory details as they tore it down piece-by-piece to discover the inner workings of CW's new ad."
Re:Where are they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, anyone who's first hearing about this from Slashdot never had a chance!
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
'Nuff said.
Idiot commentators (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting to see the tear down, but could they have found a more annoying couple of idiots for the commentary?
See this PR-SCAM before! (Score:0, Insightful)
We've seen this type of PR SCAM many times before, once where they had e.g. e-paper devices in them, which were EXTREMELY LIMITED circulation only in NYC and LA.
So unless these start popping up in the 100,000s of copies, PLEASE don't play into the marketers' card and just ignore it.
Re:Senior tech analyst? (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind you're going into this, slouched back in your chair, with full knowledge that this thing is an Android phone.
They're delving into this for the first time expecting maybe a more sophisticated version of the Esquire eInk cover. [makezine.com] The last thing they expect is to find a repurposed phone with pretty much all the hardware intact. Plus they're recording it live. They're figuring out things on the spot and thinking out loud so it won't be a boringly quiet video. If you had the magazine ad in front of you and picking it apart, you too would be saying or thinking a series of "what/why the fsck is that piece there?"
Re:See this PR-SCAM before! (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly is this a scam?
What exactly will I lose if I fall for it? And what would falling for it entail?
I'm a little unclear on what the scam part is here.....
Not that surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
If you custom-build a board, and cost-engineer it so that it just has the components you actually need, you are spending a whole bunch of money up-front (mostly, the salaries of the engineers who do the custom board design). This will pay off if you ship a large volume. This up-front cost is called "NRE", for "non-recurring engineering costs"; the final cost of your product is NRE divided by the number of units you ship, plus the actual cost of the unit (parts and assembly).
If you know you are shipping exactly 1000 magazines with this gimmick inside, a custom board makes no sense; the NRE would totally wipe out the per-board savings. The cheapest option would be a stack of pre-built boards that someone has lying around, maybe from a phone that was current technology two years ago. It wouldn't surprise me if the ROM contains an off-the-shelf build of Android, just with one additional app installed and set always to run at boot-up. They could have built a custom ROM image of Android, for example with the phone app removed, but why bother? (And clearly the phone app was not in fact removed, as the Mashable folks used it to place a call.)
steveha
The guys in the video are really fucking stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know who this mashable guys are, but they are truly fucking stupid. It took them 10 minutes of staring at what was OBVIOUSLY a fucking smartphone mobo in order to realize that it was one. And they sounded surprised!. Hey, you said it was playing video and receiving tweets, so what the hell did they expect it to be, a vacuum cleaner? They also looked at what was clearly a phone camera, missing the lens and with the CCD exposed, and they where like "is that a CCD, I think it looks like a CCD. Dude, you've got something shaped like an smartphone motherboard, with a smartphone battery, a smartphone LCD, a SIM card, and a USB port, and you wonder about what it is? The funniest part is that the article introduces them as "The technical wizards at Mashable". WTF.
Re:Stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
If iOS was free and flexible enough for a project like this, you'd have a point. It would be "the shit". But it's not, it's locked-down proprietary garbage meant to keep Apple in control of every device that runs it.