Gadget Love

I don't know if you get a lot of these over in the motherland, but I bought a gadget mag the other day. Here, you can walk into any newsagent and take your pick from a plethora of the things lining up on the shelves. I can't even recall the actual name of the one I chose. But it's fantastic, particularly as toilet reading matter.

Gadgets are great. There's page after page of reviews of phones, tablets, satnavs, TVs and things that no man needs but every man wants. My choice of the word "man" is wholly deliberate, not that I lay any claim to the slightest bit of understanding about women, but even I know they're not into gadgets.

I noticed something that's new to me; the abundance of "advertorials" in this mag. That is, adverts for a product or a company that are pretty hard to distinguish from real articles in the magazine. I use the word "real" with some trepidation, as I'm never sure how genuine the actual articles are anyhow, with the power that advertisers yield these days. I'm sure, if I were a big advertising client of a magazine that wrote a scathing article about one of my products, I'd think twice about where to place my ad budget.

But it seemed as if every other page consisted of a multi page advertorial, in similar font and appearance to the pages of the magazine. I think the magazine industry here still has certain rules that dictate these things must have "ADVERT" or something similar stuck at the top of the page somewhere for all to see, so that does make it quite easy to spot. If not, the average Joe would have a tough task to figure these out.

There I was, reading watch adverts, perusing sexy satnavs and 3D TVs when something dawned on me. A large portion of this issue was devoted to talk of tablets. Not the paracetomol and aspirin type, but the iPad and Blackberry variety. Understandably so, as they are THE gadget that everyone's talking about.

These day everyone more or less needs a tablet, such has been their meteoric rise in fame, awareness and popularity.

I thought back to the dark ages, all those years, perhaps months ago; the pre tablet days. You know what occurred to me?

Well back then, if you can remember, we had smartphones and we had laptops and no one, I repeat no one, went around muttering that what this world was lacking was something that slotted nicely into the gap between the two.

We didn't meet random chaps in pubs who had their heads down and grabbed passers by to tell them how their life would be so much better if someone brought out a device that fitted in between their phone and their laptop.

Then someone came along, I believe it might have been Steve Apple, though I'm not positive on that one, and told us that they've got this brilliant new product called the iPad, to fill that gap, the one we weren't even aware of in the first place.

Did Apple rather brilliantly create a gap in the marketplace or did they find a gap that we weren't even aware of and launch a product to fill that need? Either way it's a slice of genius. My uncertainty here is because I know not whether Apple invented the concept of the tablet, I merely know that they made it what it is today.

So I've decided to take a leaf out of Apple's book. No publication that I've seen has even mentioned it yet, but this weekend, probably on Saturday afternoon if I don't go shopping, I'm going to invent something of my own.

It's a device that will fit nicely into a gap that no ones knows about yet; the gap between the smartphone and the tablet.

It will probably have lights and all sorts of things, including a battery life of more than a few hours.

Just you wait. You heard it here first.