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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
Zip up, your persecution complex is showing.
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.....
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
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?
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
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.
Bottom of the barrel smartphones are not that expensive, closer to $200 maybe less than that. Still too much to include in regular copies of a magazine though.
This was NOT in most copies of the magazine, it was in a tiny fraction and seems pretty clearly to have been done as a publicity stunt.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Android is Linux...without all the good stuff.
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.
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.