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."

Comments

Where are they?

[Beavertank]

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.

Re:Where are they?

[qubezz]

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.

Re:Link to the article and video

[BasilBrush]

The mystery of Android's high market share but low browser share is finally solved.

Senior tech analyst?

[citizenr]

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.

Re:Senior tech analyst?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?"

The guys in the video are really fucking stupid.

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

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.