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Television Network Embeds Android Device In Magazine Ads
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."
Yes, but only 1000 of the magazines contain the electronic ad, and unfortunately they seem to be hard to come by. I've looked everywhere and have yet to find one.
Here's the direct link to the actual article and video: http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/ew-has-smartphone-inside/#92851Some-Chinese
'Nuff said.
Interesting to see the tear down, but could they have found a more annoying couple of idiots for the commentary?
I like how g4tv's "Senior tech analyst" cant tell lcd display from camera module.
The battery is refueling? WHAT? Watching that video is painful.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Yes, this is cool, but I can't go out to Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy of this week's magazine and expect to find some fun electronics inside.
More info from original source @ mashable
coding is life
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.
Oh god that girl was horrible to listen to. Dat front facing camera..... right.
Is it worthwhile buying for any reason other than "Oh look .. cool shit!"???
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
you're not going to find an ipad in a magazine anytime soon. this show Joe and Sally consumer that Android is commodotized. Don't flame me, I love Big-Bird!
-badford
That is one of the most awesome things I've ever seen!
Zip up, your persecution complex is showing.
Copy the iPhone? Has apple ever made anything original. I though all they did was repackage what was already available but geared for the masses.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Crap, I got this issue and I tossed it. I didn't even know that was there! I do remember those ads pages, but not its video.
Are they spying on us?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Has apple ever made anything original.
Actually, the iPhone, while not strictly "original", was a MASSIVE step forward in the smartphone world. At the time, the next best thing was the Treo which came with one of two crappy operating systems, and had a low-rez, stylus based touchscreen. At the time, watching SJ's keynote announcing and demonstrating the iPhone was a gigantic "Holy Shit I Want One!" moment for people like me who were trying to make real use of the smartphones of the time and being constantly frustrated by their limitations. (It wasn't yet known how ridiculously locked down the iPhone ecosystem was going to turn out to be.)
The tech in the iPhone may not have been Apple's invention, but it's not like you could just run down to your local Verizon store and buy anything remotely similar at the time. That part was all Apple.
And, no, I'm not an Apple fan-boy. I had a 1st gen iPhone and won't ever have another. But credit's gotta go where credit's due. And, yes, anyone enjoying their Android phone today probably owes Apple a big thanks. Smartphones wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today had the iPhone not changed the rules of the game.
If the innards are cheap enough that you can gut a phone and put it in a cheap magazine, how come cell phones cost so much? I call bullshit on $600.
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.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
so who will get hit with roaming fees if this is used out side of the USA???
and can I call overseas with it's sim as well?
Why was my first thought of Gob putting this in Franklin to make him talk?
well you can start a premium rate text messages systems can use this phones SIM card to sign up for it.
what about the LIVE SIM card and not removing the phone app removed and rest of the OS can put the CW on the hook for all kinds of phone fees and they better hope some does not say pick this up and goes out side of the usa and then CW is paying like $20 a meg for data.
Only thing I can think is they are playing down to the lowest common denominator, in which case, dumb or smart, they are pretty good actors.
Android was designed as an advertising channel. Seems to be working as intended.
Writers at Mashable were willing to geek out with a Swiss Army knife and a video camera...
Since we're geeking out, let's get our tools right. it's a Leatherman Squirt.
good thing directv dropped this crap and pulled VS for some time about 2 years ago.
Comcast sucks and NBC will soon be pulled down to the same level of crap.
Has apple ever made anything original.
Actually, the iPhone, while not strictly "original", was a MASSIVE step forward in the smartphone world. At the time, the next best thing was the Treo which came with one of two crappy operating systems, and had a low-rez, stylus based touchscreen.
Maybe in the US. The rest of the world had the E90. The only bit of tech the iPhone newly introduced to the smartphone market was the stylus- and glove-proof capacitive touchscreen, and whether that's even an improvement or not depends totally on your use cases.
What happened to the electronic recycling initiatives?
What happens when you push a lithium battery through a paper recycling plant?
I agree It's a shame Apple won't open up iOS so that we can fill up our landfills with magazine advertisements that are capable of phoning home.
But, hey, it's running Android! Fap fap fap!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Android is Linux...without all the good stuff.
Obviously calling them technical wizards was in jest, but you had to go and take everything at face value. Are you related to buzz killington?
Yeah yeah, btw, lovely purple picture you have there, is that an acid-filter?
If 1000 copies can fill landfills I'd be supprised.
More like this kept 1000 shit phones out of the landfills and in the hands of collectors.
How in the planet of fuck did this get modded up?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
They spent most of those 10 minutes saying "It looks like a blackberry". So I don't think it's fair to say they didn't know it was a smartphone.
I'd think they'd get a better, more wide-ranging PR boost if they just stuck $50 bills in their magazines instead. Everyone will try to be one of the lucky 1,000 people who gets one, and most will fail to do so.
Really, if you want a low-end Android device, you can get one for damn near nothing. How about an Alcatel Venture from Virgin Mobile for $50... No contract, buy as many as you want, ready to use Android device. Or how about a 7" Tablet for $50 from everybody's favorite retailer?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
[iOS is] locked-down proprietary garbage
On my Android phone I need to change some paramters in dhcp.conf. It is apparently owned by root.
To do so, I apparently need to identify a vulnerability in a binary which will lead to root privilege escalation.
What's locked-down now?
What a bunch of wazzocks!
A search with your favourite search engine (in Image), using "chinese android blackberry clone" will return an Android phone that is mighty like the motherboard in the teardown. If the clueless technologists had done that, they wouldn't have had to puzzle about which key did what....
Can I have their job please?
Android is Linux...without all the good stuff.
But it's still linux, and that's plenty good enough 'round these parts, fella.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
And no one is going to question how they're using this to track and monitor their readers? Here, have this advertising device that's capable of recording audio and video data and transmitting it back to us along with it's current location. What? Why would advertisers have any interesting in collecting data like that? You're just paranoid
It's a phone, it's a phone, it's a phone!! With two batteries and an old school USB port and a KEYBOARD!!!! AND A SPEAKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Copy the iPhone? Has apple ever made anything original. I though all they did was repackage what was already available but geared for the masses.
Apple is suing me for my gold-plated butt plug business. Apparently they think they have a patent on expensive crap for assholes.
[iOS is] locked-down proprietary garbage
On my Android phone I need to change some paramters in dhcp.conf. It is apparently owned by root.
To do so, I apparently need to identify a vulnerability in a binary which will lead to root privilege escalation.
What's locked-down now?
Why did you buy your phone from such a consumer-hostile company if you wanted to do such things? If you want Android, you have plenty to choose from, the complete continuum from locked down systems that brick or factory reset themselves after installing an unauthorized bootstrap all the way to ones where you just plug it in and do a few adb commands. That's part of the beauty: you have choice.
With Apple you have no choice, at least non-superficial choices. You can get the locked down iPhone 5 in black or the locked down iPhone 5 in white.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It's a phone, it's a phone, it's a phone!!
With two batteries and an old school USB port and a KEYBOARD!!!!
AND A SPEAKER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
She compels you to want to choke the shit out of her.
"Android is shit" (-1 Troll)
"Android is the shit" (+5 Insightful)
I get the feeling that the Slashdot editors (you know, the guys with unlimited mod points), are actually Google employees.
If you think you can do better, by all means open a tech website, have a better product to appeal to the masses, and steal all of their viewers away with your amazing tech savvy (since you can do it better than them). Until you prove your prowess, though, kindly STFU.
I think a bigger use for these guys would be as a source for spammers to generate legitimate phone verified email accounts, facebook accounts, twitter accounts, etc. There's been a bit of a drop off in that lately as SIM's get harder to purchase cheaply in bulk.
Yeah yeah, btw, lovely purple picture you have there, is that an acid-filter?
Lol. Somebody is jealous of the purple pictures...
I've noticed that Fandroids don't like to discuss the whole topic of 'phoning home'
Read the comments on the site. They really hate the female.
Nobody complained about the environmental side. Yes, it is cool to find a half digested phone for free, but many of those phones will actually land in the trash after 60 seconds of use. We were promised to get disposable advert displays in the future, but all we get is a fake.
~ Best man at your service.
... only put 1000 of these on newsstands in NY and LA. Nothing in flyover country, nothing for subscribers.
I've been looking all over for one of these for tinkering -- should be possible to sideload an app at the very least, and it looks like a spare BB trackball might make navigation of menus possible (I think I have an old Crackberry floating around here somewhere).
If nothing else, this looks like a fun device to hack: break it, and you've lost a few bucks at worst, and the LiON battery alone is worth the magazine cost.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Looks like this is a product of Americhip, the same company responsible for the Video-In-Print ads found in earlier magazines.
Shouldn't you ask what I do for a living before assuming it doesn't involve tearing apart unknown devices?
I own a software development company, and a big part of my day is bringing in weird shit from china, tearing it apart, figuring out what it is, how it works, identifying where it came from, going up the chain until I get to the actual manufacturer, then negotiating a bulk price.
I do this with DVR capture cards and external capture devices (our products are linux-based, so I end up tearing apart lots of cards looking for bttv or saa compatible cards), IP Cameras (which don't really offer any documentation), android devices, complete DVRs, digital signage boxes, etc, etc, etc.
So, yeah, it is what I do, and yeah, I'm fucking good at it.
Regarding a tech website, well, not a website, but my company has it's own branded tech space in local TV and local radio, and yes, we are better at it too.
So kindly STFU.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
You think you can decimate our industry?! You think you can reduce us from journalists to mere "content creators"?! You think you can take our work and stick it in your little glowing devices?! WE'LL SHOW YOU! WE'LL TAKE YOUR LITTLE GLOWY SMARTPHONE AND GLUE IT RIGHT INSIDE OUR MAGAZINE.
No, not really. You're someone who breaks things down? That's great, I do it too for a fortune 500 company serving 40 million customers. And I sound a hell of a lot like those folks when I'm breaking open new kits we get in. I also know people like you who know everything, but are boring as hell to watch as they use spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes and multimeters to trace out circuits and see how crap works. I'd rather have someone who may know a little less, but at least is entertaining to watch.