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00:00I tweeted this recently, just thinking about how Vine was the home of short form vertical
00:05videos before it died in 2016.
00:08And now in 2022, TikTok has been the most downloaded app on the planet for like the
00:14last 12 straight months in a row, and short form vertical videos are blowing up.
00:21And I could reach no other conclusion than Vine was ahead of its time.
00:28You might look at the electric vehicle revolution that's happening right now around us and think,
00:32wow, we have a lot to thank Tesla for.
00:36But Tesla wasn't anywhere near the first electric car.
00:40That would technically be in the 1890s.
00:44But even in the 1990s, there was an electric car from GM called the EV1.
00:48It was this little two door electric coupe with a 55 mile range that sold less than 2000
00:53units before being discontinued, removed from the road and crushed.
00:58Now, of course, years later, EVs are on the rise.
01:00Everyone's turning their car companies entirely electric from the inside out.
01:04But no one remembers the GM EV1 because it was ahead of its time.
01:09And so that got me thinking.
01:11There have been so many products that have launched over the years that have failed,
01:15but just because the world wasn't ready for them yet.
01:18And I have a few favorites that have come to mind.
01:20And so these are my top favorite three gadgets that were ahead of their time.
01:26So number three, Google Glass.
01:29This one's a classic.
01:30I think a lot of people remember Google Glass, but probably forget some of the crazier details.
01:34So first of all, this was back in 2013, nearly a decade ago, and they revealed it in the
01:40craziest way.
01:41They had skydivers literally jump out of a blimp while streaming an entire skydive live
01:48through Google Hangouts straight from Glass, where they eventually landed on top of the
01:52building Google I.O. was happening in.
01:54Then they tore through the insides on bikes to get up to this stage.
01:58I mean, that's a pretty grand reveal for a pair of smart glasses with a head-mounted
02:03projection display that would give you extra contextual information about the world around
02:08you.
02:09I do remember this being the first genuinely useful looking pair of AR glasses, though.
02:13So you could see turn-by-turn navigation in front of you with Google Maps.
02:18You could ask Google Assistant questions with your voice and just get it to show you results
02:21anywhere you're at.
02:22Or it could show you your notifications from your phone as they came in.
02:25Now, it was super nerdy to want to do all of this hands-free all the time by wearing
02:30something on your face, but even at $1,500, there was a lot of interest from nerds like
02:36me, but just general curiosity from the public, and Google actually made this Explorer Edition
02:42that was a super limited edition run that would help them test them in real life.
02:46But pretty quickly, there started to become problems.
02:49I mean, I guess the first problem was that it looked like this, which, you know, I mean,
02:56it's cool that you have a camera and you can see like a first-person view of photos and
03:00videos of things and share them, but this was 2013 and people were absolutely not ready
03:06for people wearing a camera and a computer on their face.
03:11It didn't have any sort of visual indicator on the outside that you were recording or
03:15taking photos, so people started getting kicked out of movie theaters while wearing
03:19them because security thought they might be recording the movie.
03:22And someone also got pulled over in their car and ticketed because the police thought
03:25they might have been watching a movie on Google Glass.
03:28But even if you could get past the whole camera on the face thing, like this is what it would
03:31look like to talk to somebody using Glass, you know, the button up here, the glancing
03:36up to the side, the touchpad.
03:38If it wasn't like obvious already, it was kind of unnatural to be talking to someone
03:42while doing that.
03:43So eventually, Google killed the project for consumers.
03:47Glass actually does live on through an enterprise version where it doesn't have to worry about
03:51looking like an everyday pair of glasses acceptable to wear in public, but you can actually buy
03:56Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 right now for your company where you can do live video
04:01or give step-by-step instructions on how to assemble things, stuff like that.
04:06But the point is, it got utterly rejected by regular people, by the public, and we haven't
04:11seen it for years.
04:13But it's 2022 now, and it's very clear that head-mounted displays, VR, and AR are all,
04:19again, right on the horizon and about to explode again.
04:22Snapchat has made multiple versions of their spectacles that let you share the world from
04:26your first-person perspective.
04:28That's a camera on your face.
04:29Facebook partnered with Ray-Bans to make some sunglasses that record video and photos.
04:34That's also a camera on your face.
04:35And Apple, of course, has had a rumored AR or VR headset for what feels like years now,
04:41probably coming out in the next year or two, and knowing Apple, designed to be worn and
04:46accepted by regular people.
04:48And even at IOW this year, kind of a callback, Google did one more thing, and it was a pair
04:53of AR glasses, but this time focusing on live translation.
04:58So not quite the same thing as Google Glass, but still, it's a start.
05:01Google Glass walked so these could run.
05:05They were for sure ahead of their time.
05:08All right, so number two was the Samsung Galaxy camera.
05:13So this is a bit of a lesser-known gadget, some of you might remember it, but it was
05:16one of my favorite things ever, so I want to give it its flowers.
05:18So this is 2012.
05:20This is the same year as the Galaxy S3, but this is basically a whole mirrorless camera
05:28with a Galaxy S3 on the back.
05:30So this is a 16-megapixel camera with a 21x optical zoom lens on the back.
05:35All the processing power of a Galaxy S3 with a quad-core chip, onboard storage, one gig
05:41of RAM, and it was running the newest version of Android, which at the time was Android
05:464.1.
05:47Basically, the only thing it was lacking was an actual cellular radio to be able to make
05:50phone calls.
05:51If you ask me, great product idea.
05:54Great idea.
05:55Like, obviously, most cameras have pretty bad UIs as far as navigating through them,
06:00but even if they are pretty good, they don't have an internet connection and a phone on
06:04the back.
06:05So how often are you just trying to take a picture and then do some quick edits in Lightroom
06:10and then put it on Instagram?
06:11Like just that quick workflow right there.
06:13All the time.
06:14That's exactly what this was built to do.
06:17It had a smartphone display.
06:19It had great performance.
06:20It had the UI for it.
06:21It was a dream.
06:22So why did this fail?
06:24Well, you could blame it on social media being a little bit older.
06:28You could blame it on maybe a camera market being too small at that time.
06:33People didn't want a dedicated camera, but at the end of the day, the real reason was
06:36turned out the camera wasn't that good.
06:38The actual quality of the photos weren't that much better or easier to take than a Galaxy
06:44S3 in the first place.
06:46And so that's the reason the reviews are terrible and nobody actually wanted to buy the thing.
06:49But in the background, it was very clear that a real camera with a full Android experience
06:55or a full UI on the back made a lot of sense.
06:58Like I said, most camera UIs currently pretty bad.
07:01And even if they aren't, they sure as hell can't edit a photo and then post it on Twitter
07:05or Instagram.
07:06Fun fact, Android was actually supposed to be a digital camera OS before it got bought
07:13up by Google and turned into a phone OS.
07:15So it really makes you think, but I think what it comes down to is basically there's
07:18a friction to get something from a camera to Instagram.
07:23There's taking the photo and then wirelessly transferring it to your phone, maybe, which
07:28is either going to compress it or it's going to take a long time.
07:32And so most people, most people would just take a photo with their smartphone.
07:36It's easy.
07:37It's good enough.
07:38But for photographers, for the creator class, for people enthusiasts like myself, that friction
07:43between getting a good shot and putting it online is the problem.
07:47Now there are other cracks at solving this.
07:49There were two generations of the Galaxy camera before it was canceled.
07:53Last year, Zeiss made a camera called the Zeiss ZX1.
07:56It's a full frame camera with a fixed 35 millimeter F2 lens that ran Android.
08:01And it also had Lightroom mobile and Instagram pre-installed, which let you edit right there
08:05on the screen and immediately post.
08:07But it was also $6,000, which is entirely out of reach for most people.
08:12And also you couldn't install any other app besides Lightroom and Instagram.
08:16And then there have been plenty of attempts from companies to make phones that have all
08:20of the features of a full time camera.
08:23So Panasonic CM1 comes to mind.
08:25This is from 2014.
08:26And this had a one inch 20 megapixel sensor and a 28 mil F2.8 Leica branded lens.
08:32Definitely looked like a full blown camera, but the rest of the phone wasn't good enough
08:36to justify people buying this one.
08:39We even had Sony Tri add-on lenses for your phone.
08:42So here's another name for you.
08:44Sony QX10.
08:45I actually owned one of these.
08:47I never reviewed it, but it was a separate camera and lens that connects to your phone
08:52via Bluetooth and pairs via NFC and just latches to the back of your phone to give
08:58you a better camera.
09:00But even that was $250 and didn't work perfectly every time.
09:04You know how Bluetooth is.
09:05There's still so much friction.
09:07And again, at the end of the day, most people totally fine with just the smartphone camera
09:11for most stuff they're putting on Instagram.
09:13I just did a video on the Sony Xperia 1 Mark IV.
09:16If you haven't checked that out already, that one has real optical zoom.
09:20So it's a better physical camera.
09:22But again, for photographers, creators, enthusiasts, people like myself, I maintain that we are
09:26ready right now for a good internet-connected camera.
09:32Brainstorming out loud, imagine an iPhone UI on a real full-frame mirrorless camera.
09:38So a big sensor, big lens, but the processing power and computational photography with an
09:45M1 chip.
09:46Give this thing onboard storage.
09:48Give it USB type C, please.
09:51And then you can grow pro in the name and that would be great.
09:54Yeah, I would want one.
09:56But until then, yeah, Galaxy camera was ahead of its time.
10:01So then number one, last but not least, is the Motorola Atrix.
10:05Does anybody remember the Motorola Atrix?
10:08This was a smartphone.
10:09It was the first phone with a dual core Tegra 2 processor.
10:14And it was the first Android phone with a fingerprint sensor, powerful stuff.
10:17But most importantly, it could connect to something called the Motorola LapDock to give
10:22you a full laptop experience powered completely off of your phone.
10:27It's like, whoa, wait a second.
10:29What is a computer?
10:30Right?
10:31I think we all basically like the general idea, the concept that you only buy one computer
10:36and then you plug this one smallest computer into bigger and bigger shells to become a
10:42bigger and bigger form factor and a bigger and bigger computer because it's so powerful
10:46at its core, right?
10:47That idea is dope.
10:50But there's two pretty big hurdles towards actually achieving that power and software.
10:56So Motorola with the Atrix, they attacked the software problem head on, right?
11:00So their version of Android was called Moto Blur.
11:02And when you plugged it into the LapDock, immediately that would turn into an experience
11:06pretty similar to what we have with Samsung DeX now.
11:09Full on laptop looking thing, a dock, apps, windows, the whole deal.
11:14But the tougher challenge was definitely power, right?
11:18So this phone came out in 2011.
11:20The first dual core chip in any smartphone was a pretty big deal at the time, but let's
11:24be real, it's not powerful enough to be a full fledged laptop, photo editing, video
11:30editing, all of that stuff, much less even a Chromebook at that time.
11:33And so this actually kind of creates a third problem on its own basically, which is if
11:37you buy into this ecosystem, this version of that idea, you're kind of stuck.
11:44This Atrix cost 200 bucks on a two-year contract, but then the LapDock cost $500 extra for basically
11:52a shell with a keyboard and a screen and a battery.
11:55If you upgraded your phone, you could no longer use your laptop.
11:59So the Atrix didn't hit, right?
12:01But now in 2022, the computing power in smartphones has come a long way.
12:07People in benchmarks and reviews might think we're nitpicking in seeing if there's a difference
12:12between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and the 888, but really the fact is all the extra headroom
12:16we're getting has way more functionality besides just texting and using the phone like normal.
12:21It can become a computer.
12:22We also already know the M1 chips powering the latest MacBooks right now are based on
12:27A14 Bionic from the iPhone, just scaled up.
12:30So you can imagine plugging the smartphone into a larger form factor, even if it's not
12:34a video editing machine, still it's a very capable laptop.
12:38If it were a browsing machine, honestly, even photo editing would probably go very
12:42smoothly just like the way we see it on iPads.
12:44Plus it's obviously great having all your messages, but also all your apps and all your
12:48files just with you all the time, no matter what machine you're using.
12:51So this idea definitely has legs for the near future.
12:54Honestly, the biggest problem that I see or the biggest obstacle in the way of it is still
13:00the ecosystem problem, specifically because a company like Apple would much rather have
13:07you buy an iPhone and an iPad and a MacBook than just to sell you one computer that can
13:14be everything.
13:15So there are some third-party attempts at a modern version of this.
13:17There's a company called Nex that makes the Nex Dock.
13:20This is basically the same thing as the Atrix, but over a USB-C connection for Samsung phones.
13:26Boom, portable Dex laptop.
13:28But again, that's only for Samsung phones.
13:30So really the fact that the whole ecosystem has to play for this idea to work makes it
13:34much harder than just one single gadget.
13:38So the Atrix was for sure ahead of its time and probably will be for a little while longer,
13:42but I like the possibilities here.
13:44I like where we're going with that one.
13:46Either way.
13:47Yeah.
13:48Vine was definitely ahead of its time.
13:50Vine walked so TikTok could run.
13:53All right.
13:54Thanks for watching.
13:55Catch you guys in the next one.
13:57Peace.