Downtown in gadget city

Last week, I had the rather amusing job of sitting on a sofa for a TV programme and evaluating lots of newfangled gadgets.

The idea was like this: three of us would stare dumbfounded at a digital widget, until the presenter would pick one of us and say: 'So, is it any good?' There would be the briefest pause as the chosen journalist processed a panic message from his/her brain stem which said: 'Quick, kill them all, eat them and run away,' before our training kicked in. Then, smooth as you like, we'd smile wryly and say: 'Nah. Never work.' (Asking a journalist about how things will work in real life has always seemed slightly odd to me. It's roughly equivalent to having a broken leg and asking a hacksaw manufacturer what he thinks the best course of treatment is. But you never heard me say that.)

Luckily for our hosts, our approach was right on the mark. Because with few exceptions, the widgets were virtually unusable, following the general hi-tech principle of making something according to the BWC standard (Because We Can).

Occasionally, when we see something silly, it gives us all a good laugh, so we haven't yet called for BWC design to be made a capital offence.

For example, here's a BWC from our TV adventure: a device that sits on top of your TV, connects to the phone line and video conferences with your mate.What a fantastic idea. Apart from four small niggles: 1: Your mate has to have one of these devices as well. 2: It costs #400 so he won't be your mate for long. 3: It uses an ordinary phone line so the picture updates at an unusable seven frames a second. 4: Watching your mate sitting on a sofa complaining to you about how skint he is because he bought a video conferencing thingy is even less fun than watching You've Been Framed. Although if you're prepared to shell out for this product, you're probably not bright enough to appreciate such minor objections. You and your mate deserve each other.

Another BWC for last week: a digital camera that stores pictures on a floppy disk. Amazing! Apart from the minor problem that the picture quality is terrible, the camera is big and floppy disk shaped and a perfectly good system for digital cameras already exists using smart cards. This produces good quality pictures and lets you send the card away to be developed into prints. When the decision to design these products was made, did no bright young thing think to ask: 'Why are we doing this?'

There's only one area BWC doesn't apply: making things cheap. The principle of BWC means making a new, more complex version of something that works already. So rather than make a #500 PC, manufacturers make a #1,500 PC that's a bad hi-fi too. Why not use BWC principles on PC pricing, some consumers ask. 'Why bother?' manufacturers say. 'Customers who buy analogue TV video conferencing units have deep pockets and small brains.' In short, we get away with it because we can.

Tim Phillips is a freelance IT journalist.