Announcing the 2014 Pogie Awards!
Good evening, and welcome to the 10th annual Pogie Awards!
Now, these awards don’t go to the best products of the year. You really don’t need another one of those articles. (But if you’re interested, here you go: iPhone 6, Kindle Voyage, Sony RX100 Mark 3 camera, Harmony Home Hub. Done.)
No, these awards go to individual features within products. Sometimes, they are even terrific ideas that wound up in lousy products. The point is to celebrate the lightbulb in some designer’s or engineer’s head — and that idea’s successful journey out of committee, past the lawyers, and into the hands of the delighted public.
Ready? The envelopes, please!
The Input Award
The BlackBerry Passport is a strange little number from a company whose smartphone market share is now so small, you can count it on one finger. But this very square phone does have a remarkable feature: a physical keyboard and trackpad.
“Ahhh,” you say. “I see the keyboard — but where’s the trackpad?”
Turns out the keyboard is the trackpad! You drag your finger across the keys to move the cursor or scroll a webpage. It works great.
On a smartphone, size is essential, and space is limited. So this touch-sensitive hybrid keyboard is a winner all the way around.
The Cellular Award
With the cellular version of the iPad Air 2, Apple executed a mind-blowing feat of engineering and negotiation: It created a single SIM card that works with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint. And other carriers around the world.
The extremely powerful idea behind this card is freedom of choice. On the iPad, there’s no two-year contract baked into the purchase. You sign up for service only during the months when you need it.
So this special SIM card means that, in theory, you can hop around, shop around, from carrier to carrier. Use T-Mobile when its signal is best, Sprint when its signal is best, and so on.
(And if you really want to release some endorphins: Can you imagine a world where every SIM card worked this way? When even on your phone, you could freely shift between carriers, so you always got the strongest signal for the best price?)
In reality, the universal SIM card doesn’t deliver quite that much joy. Verizon didn’t participate, and AT&T got scared: If you ever choose an AT&T plan, your iPad becomes locked to AT&T forever. So really, the only free hopping you can do is between T-Mobile and Sprint. Furthermore, you get the special SIM card only when you buy your iPad from Apple, not one of the carriers.
But, hey — this award is for the idea, remember?
The Touchscreen Award
The past two years have brought us a parade of interesting new ways to interact with our phones. There’s hands-free voice control, now on both the iPhone (“Hey, Siri”) and many Android phones (“OK, Google”). Samsung’s Galaxy phones can detect your hand waving over the screen without touching it.
Our winner this year is the much-hyped, not-very-available OnePlus One smartphone. And its great idea? Touchscreen gestures that work even when the screen is off.
For example, you can draw a circle on the darkened screen to start up the camera. Or draw a V to turn on the flashlight. (The V shape, in particular, is a clever choice, easy to remember: Looks like a beam of light.)
It’s all in the name of saving steps and responding to you faster.
The Tech Safety Award
The Tagg GPS Plus is a location-tracking collar for your pet. Put this collar on Bowser, and you can see where he is on a phone app map. Or you can get a notification if he wanders out of the yard.
That’s a good idea, all right. But this year’s winning feature is a clever enhancement: temperature alerts. Now you’ll know if the little darling is getting too hot or too cold — if you’ve left him shut up in the car, for example.
The Hygiene Award
After you brush your teeth, you’re supposed to rinse. But how will you bring water from the faucet to your mouth?
You can keep a glass next to the sink. You can stick your head under the faucet. You can use the bristles of the brush as a glorified sponge to bring 0.00003 ounces of water to your mouth from the running water over and over again.
O you can get the Amron Rinser Toothbrush.
It’s as elegant as can be, and entirely water-powered. Hold the neck of the toothbrush under running water, press the tiny button, and boom: the toothbrush shoots out a foot-high water fountain, arcing gracefully over your sink. Simply lean forward, slurp, rinse, and spit.
The list of first-world problems just got a little bit shorter.
The Photography Award
Sony already had a major winner with its RX100 cameras: tiny compact cameras with enormous sensors and amazing lenses. They’re expensive as heck ($800) — but they give you pro-style photos from a tiny machine.
The third-generation RX100, the Mark III, addresses one of the most common complaints about compact cameras: There’s no eyepiece viewfinder. Nothing to hold up to your eye when sunlight is washing out the screen, or when you don’t want to annoy fellow audience members with a glowing LCD, or when you want a more stable shot.
Not a single compact camera from Canon, Nikon, or Olympus is available with an optical viewfinder. The reason is simple: Most people would rather dedicate the space to having a big screen.
But on the Mark III, Sony has built something nobody’s ever built before: a pop-up viewfinder. When you want to look through it, you flick a little button, and the viewfinder snaps upward. It’s been hiding behind that huge screen all along. To complete the setup, you tug the back of the viewfinder, extending it.
It’s the best of both worlds, really.
The App Award
It’s Push for Pizza, a simple app that lets you order a pizza for delivery with three fast taps. Seriously, three taps.
You specify cheese or pepperoni, confirm, and you’re done. In 20 minutes, the nearest pizza joint delivers the pizza, all paid up, even the tip.
You kind of wish that there were more participating pizza joints (there are zero in my town). But the idea, people. The idea.
The Pogie Ultimo
Every year, I award the Pogie Ultimo to the one idea with the greatest potential to improve the lives of the downtrodden technology-using masses. This year, the Ultimo goes to a single feature in a single program on a single operating system. It’s MailDrop.
From the dawn of email, we’ve been told to be careful when sending file attachments. If it’s over about 5 megabytes, it’ll bounce back to you.
The world is full of methods to work around that stupid limitation: Dropbox, SendThisFile.com, mailing a flash drive. But all of them require more steps and more setup and more thinking than just attaching a file to an email.
But now, if you use OS X Yosemite on the Mac, the built-in Mail program lets you send huge attachments to anyone — up to 5 gigabytes, 1,000 times bigger than the old limit. You don’t even have to do anything or set anything up; it just works.
If the recipient also has Mail, she sees the attachment right there in the message, as usual. If she uses some other program or operating system, she gets a link that auto-downloads the file you sent. (The link is good for 30 days. You can send up to 1 terabyte of files into this waiting area.)
All of this is free. And the files don’t count against your iCloud storage.
MailDrop is liberating, simple, and really useful. What took the world so long?
And goodnight!
And there you have it, folks: the 2014 Pogie Awards. Another year, another crop of superb, fresh ideas. Congratulations to the winners — and to all of us, for being wise enough to embrace genius when we see it.
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