Good evening, and welcome to The Dalles, Ore.! Here in the cafetorium of the James A. Garfield Middle School, we meet every year for the biggest event in technology: the Pogie awards!
We don’t award these coveted trophies to the best products of the year; everybody does that. No, the Pogies celebrate the best ideas of the year: ingenious features that somehow made it past the lawyers, through the penny-pinching committees and into real-world tech gadgets — even if the products overall are turkeys.
So now, for the eighth straight year — the FedEx envelopes, please!
SMART STAY On Samsung’s Galaxy S III phone, the front-facing camera looks for your eyes. When you’re not looking at the screen, it dims to save battery power. It brightens right back up when you return your gaze.
POWER NAP Most of the world’s laptops do exactly one thing when you close their lids: sleep. All other activity stops.
But Apple asked: Why? Why can’t network activity keep chugging away even when the lid is closed? Why can’t your laptop keep backing itself up, downloading e-mail and syncing its online data (calendars, calendar notes, reminders, photos)?
That is the idea behind Power Nap, a feature of OS X Mountain Lion that works on recent MacBook models. You can wake up, grab your laptop and head out, confident that it is backed up and has the latest mail downloaded.
SLIPSTREAM On Amazon’s 8.9-inch Kindle HD, something ingenious happens when you call up a big-name Web site: It pops onto your screen fast, all at once. It’s almost as though the Kindle’s browser is loading a JPEG screenshot of a Web page, rather than the dozens of individual graphics, text bits and other elements that constitute a Web page. And that’s exactly what it is doing. Behind the scenes, Amazon’s servers grab frequent screenshots of the most popular Web sites; when you visit one, what you see first is that JPEG image (with live links in the right places, fortunately).
While you are studying that image, the browser continues to fetch the component pieces of the page — and after a few seconds, a blink (and occasionally a shifted element) lets you know that you are now looking at the real deal. It is a sneaky, logical, brilliant trick that saves you time and costs you nothing.
CYCLORAMIC Just when you think that nobody could possibly have another fresh idea for a phone app, Cycloramic ($1) makes 360-degree panoramic videos — without a tripod or swivel.
You stand the phone upright and tap the Go button. Incredibly, the phone, balancing on its end, begins to rotate itself. Freakiest darned thing you ever saw. Great for winning bar bets or establishing new religions.
If you’ve ever seen a phone scoot itself along a table when it is in buzz mode, you get the principle. The app triggers the phone’s vibration module at exactly the right frequencies to make the phone turn on the table. The phone’s sensors figure out how far it’s rotated.
It works only on shiny surfaces like glass, polished granite or laminated wood (like desks), and only the iPhone 5 has exactly the right balance. It’s a jaw-dropper.
ELECTRONIC LEASHES The Ciago iAlert and Cobra Tag are Bluetooth keychain fobs that communicate with your iPhone or Android phone. Once you’re 30 feet away from the phone, the keychain starts beeping, as though to say, “You’re leaving your $200 phone behind, you idiot!” It works the other way, too; the phone beeps if you leave your keys behind.
In practice, these fobs are cheaply built and, if the Amazon reviews are to be believed, not always reliable. But remember — on the night of the Pogies, it’s the idea that counts.
BLUETOOTH 4.0 Bluetooth is that wireless technology that connects gadgets within 30 feet — your phone to your headset, for example — and kills your battery charge. Right?
Actually, it doesn’t anymore. Bluetooth 4.0, built into the latest iPhone and Android phones, is also called Bluetooth LE (low energy) for a reason. For the most part, it uses power only when it has data to exchange. The rest of the time, it sleeps.
State of the Art: Pogie Awards for the Brightest Ideas of 2012
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State of the Art: Pogie Awards for the Brightest Ideas of 2012
