Smartphone Beta Test.com

The ads for the new Nokia Windowsphone, Lumia 900, sure are appealing and got me to checkout the website smartphonebetatest.com. Thinking the ad is some awareness campaign - you know like "Truth" or the anti-bullying movement - I checked out the website.  The first time I saw the ad I completley missed the little "Nokia" symbol on the monitor of one of the computers in the background. Here I was thinking that the smartphone was going to be revealed as something much smarter than what we originally thought.

Of course this just goes to show how I let my imagination get the better of me.  All those jokes about the smartphone being it's own entity.  Some might even think this is how the Terminator would come into exsistance - starting with a phone that had a mind of it's own.  So maybe we didn't think it would be a phone at first, it was supposed to be a robot, like in the movie "I, Robot, " but maybe reality is starting in a different way. After all,  just like evolution - humans evolving from apes and such - the robot has to start somewhere.

As silly as it sounds that the destruction of Man-Kind came from a phone, think about how the iphone and Siri. She recognizes your voice, does what she is asked, learns your preferences. That sounds really smart.  The way Google learns search words you use or text most often seems smart but could also just be phising technology; being cookies, caching, whatever is used to remember what you have in your shopping cart on different websites while shopping.  Just like every movie about a machine gone wrong (can we say: 2001, A Space Odyssey?) we have ignorantly created a smart entity that can obey, function and learn but expect the machine not to advance beyond us?

I think about when my guy and I upgraded from flip phones to smartphones and how truly different they are.  My phone acted fine, but my guy's phone deleted his apps, re-arranged the names and phone numbers of different contacts, had 4g connection but couldn't make phone calls.  Just weird things that would happen on their own, that no customer service agent could explain. Finally we were instructed to send his phone in to trade in for another because sometimes the new technology would do things on its own. Faulty models. His new phone works just fine but it got me to thinking about why it would do things on its own. Did the technology actually think for itself? Did that mean we had actually created something so life-like that is had come alive?

Well, its a great story idea to say the least.  Because that is not at all what the website was about.  There are funny clips about two co-workers making fun of another co-worker for his ideas or how he treated his phone, but nothing about the phone being alive.  So overall, the ad campaign worked - it got me to the website, it got me talking about the product but my excitement quickly died when I discovered what the site actually was. Of course the videos didn't exactly live up to my conspiracy theory, but then again, maybe to some people the idea that a phone company might make a faulty product to get you to buy a new one more often is a new one - but who knows. 

Maybe more will be revealed when the product comes out. Maybe there will be more hype about how awesome the new phone is. Maybe the phone will be indestructable and that would be nice.  But as for imagination - sometimes using your own can be much more exciting. Afterall it takes imagination to make new inventions and so continue dreaming so great things can keep happening.