This 1998 PDA Review Video Shows How Gadget Design Has Stalled

This isn't an April Fool's joke, but can we just pretend it is? Imagine if Google, Apple, or Samsung produced and released this today, hyping a bunch of wacky devices with a melange of weird shapes and scatterbrained functionality. It'd be a hit, because this 1998 episode of "Computer Chronicles," dedicated to the state of the PDA industry, blends the perfect mix of humor and plausibility that you'd want in a prank. It's also rather indicative of just how vanilla gadget design has become.

No slight meant to Stewart Cheifet, whose "Computer Chronicles" and "Net Cafe" were pioneering works in tech TV, and which stand to this day as some of the best time capsules of the first dot-com era. This episode is no different, and as much as it's funny now (a Palm Pilot with two megabytes of memory? Ha!), it's also worth watching simply to be reminded just how wacky device makers used to be.

These days, with smartphones ruling the gadget world, we've hit a design dead-end. Years of sales and high-dollar focus groups and innovation-stifling patent lawsuits have left us all holding phones that are all more or less all rectangles with standardized aspect ratios and interfaces that are increasingly convergent. Sure, that means that gadget designers have basically perfected the smartphone formula, but when you have to start busting out the colors to sell the next generation of devices, it's clear we're nearing an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

Compare that to the opening montage of this video: it's kind of stunning how many form factors there are. Some of them are kinda horrifying (that Hewlett Packard brick thing looks like its best use would be as a hockey puck) while others remind me of the good ol' gadget days of flimsy plastic and fragile designs–here's looking at you, Qualcomm PDA/flip phone thing.

But still, that diversity is refreshing, especially in a gadget environment where manufacturers, not content with simply chasing each other's design tails, now spend their time differentiating themselves by copying each other's ads. So yes, our phones are greater than ever, and are far more capable than the days of IR data transfers. (Remember how cool that was at the time?)

An April Fool's prank the video is not. But if a manufacturer released this exact video today as a prank, it'd surely be a hit. That's not to say that gadgets today aren't simply better, from a functionality and design standpoint, than they once were. They are.

Yet that also means that designs today aren't as diverse as they once were, and it means that you've got almost zippo chance of finding a phone that's perfect for you, unless you're all about slabs. (Case in point: the death of the QWERTY phone.) So while I'm not going to say that HP's hockey puck was a good idea, diversity in the gadget realm is a good thing, and it'd be nice to see a bit of risk make a comeback.