But…it rains all the time!
I don’t think it is so much that a watch is a gadget, as it is that there was so much fuss over digital watches, while regular dials do the job just as well.
Naw. Douglas Adams thought digital watches were pretty neat. He was a huge gadgetphile.
I’ll second (or third) downloadable cell-phone ringtones. As far as I can see, their only usefulness is in showing how “hip” their owner is. The only thing that they do that a simple ring doesn’t is to annoy more people.
I think the original quote about digital watches had to do with their original implementation. Maybe some of you are too young to remember, but the original digital watches were of the LED, rather than the LCD variety. In order to conserve battery power (which was still short-lived with LEDs), they didn’t show the time until you pushed a button, which would light up the LEDs. Which meant that it took two hands and a couple of seconds to find out what time it was – not exactly an improvement on analog watches.
I’ll just say I don’t mind ringtones per se – I find them useful for making sure the damn phone making the racket in public is mine – but I don’t see the point in paying $3 or whatever for a 30-second low-grade reproduced snippet of music.
From the first episode of the “Quandary Phase” of the radio series, which just aired the other day:
Yes, a lot of people were bamboozled by those early digital watches. Like the game that no one could ever figure out how to play. Or the feature that let you check Tokyo time, and then you couldn’t figure out how to switch it back to your own time zone.
Adams may have been referencing the general state of technology in the '70s, where inventors were hitting their stride (a great deal of the tech we use today originates from a '70s invention) but users weren’t anywhere near catching up to them. Nowadays, most people are techno-savvy enough that you don’t have to be the guy who invented it* to know how to use it. And for the rest, it’s been dumbed down enough that in order to use the basic functions, all you have to do is choose from a scroll-down list and choose the option that’s already lit up for you.
*By “it” I mean various “its” such as the iPod, the internet, cell phones and so forth.
No. They’re really dumb.
To answer the question, I think simply “cell phones” would do the trick quite nicely.
I wasn’t thinking of this when I first posted the topic, but after a second viewing of the film it struck me that camera cell phones would have been a great alteration of the original quote. In fact I wonder if the film makers had the same idea as me 'cause they kinda worked it in- they just didn’t spell it out for us with a quote.
Think of how silly Arthur is presented the way he holds onto that camera cell phone with Tricia’s picture (she wasn’t Trillian yet). He had it with him in the pocket of his bathrobe as he lay in front of the bulldozers (silly). He was gushing over it at the pub while Ford was trying to prepare him for the much bigger issue of the imminent destruction of the Earth (silly). He was even fixated on it still when he was on the Vogon ship- a point at which someone less silly might have had other concerns (silly). Finally he loses the camera cell phone at nearly the same point in the story as the book Arthur had lost (the use of) his digital watch.
Hmmm? Methinks there’s a good chance that all that business with his camera cell phone was indeed meant (partially*) to stand in for all the digital watch silliness.
*and, of course, it was a device to help introduce us to Tricia/Trillian earlier in the story.
The crotch picture left much to the imagination, though I’m happy that I followed the link 'cause it included all those pictures of that cute baby! Oh my! that’s a helluva cute baby! Who is that baby??? So cute!
The cash the producers got from Nokia being a mere fringe benefit 