Television Network Embeds Android Device In Magazine Ads

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Television Network Embeds Android Device In Magazine Ads

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday October 4, 2012 @11:50AM from the calling-all-ads dept.

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."

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Where are they? by Beavertank · 2012-10-04 11:55 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
1. Re:Where are they? by mrchaotica · 2012-10-04 11:57 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Clearly, anyone who's first hearing about this from Slashdot never had a chance!
  
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  "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
2. Re:Where are they? by qubezz · 2012-10-04 12:48 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  News of the insert was posted on September 23, so this news is hitting slashdot kinda late to actually find one. Word is that they were just in NY and LA.
Link to the article and video by Paska · 2012-10-04 11:58 · Score: 4, Informative

Here's the direct link to the actual article and video: http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/ew-has-smartphone-inside/#92851Some-Chinese
1. Re:Link to the article and video by BasilBrush · 2012-10-04 12:09 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  The mystery of Android's high market share but low browser share is finally solved.
Re:Stupid by mmell · 2012-10-04 11:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

Android is the shit.
'Nuff said.
Senior tech analyst? by citizenr · 2012-10-04 12:18 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
1. Re:Senior tech analyst? by mastershake82 · 2012-10-04 12:44 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Seconded... they can't figure out that basically, a directional style type navigation device is missing and they keep trying to navigate with what is clearly a spot for the android home, search, back, menu hotkeys.
  
  Only thing I was interested in was, can you take the SIM out and will it work in another device?
2. Re:Senior tech analyst? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-04 13:30 · 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. 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! by bonehead · 2012-10-04 13:56 · Score: 4, 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 by steveha · 2012-10-04 14:07 · Score: 4, 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

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The guys in the video are really fucking stupid. by GNUALMAFUERTE · 2012-10-04 14:14 · 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.

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WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Re:Stupid by Robert+Zenz · 2012-10-04 17:33 · Score: 4, Funny

Android is Linux...without all the good stuff.