I once had an idea that it might be fun to write a technology column. What Jeremy Clarkson did with cars, I thought, and Giles Coren and A.A. Gill do with restaurants, I could do with… phones and stuff. It could be one of those launchpad-type columns, I thought, where you don’t really write about the stuff you’re supposed to be writing about at all, but invariably end up writing about yourself. I do love them.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Technology. I tried it for a couple of weeks, online. I reckon I probably could have invented a new genre, if I’d stuck at it, but I wasn’t that sorry when the project faded away. The problem was, once you’ve talked about the colour of a thing, and how many buttons it’s got, there usually isn’t anywhere else to go. ‘You know the way your BlackBerry isn’t quite solid enough to be used to beat a man to death?’ I was writing even before I’d finished the first article. Phones are just phones. Tablets are just big phones. Laptops are either unusually thin or they aren’t. It doesn’t provoke thought, this stuff. It narrows it. It turns it in, not out.
All of which, anyway, is my preamble before I start to tell you about a thing I bought the other day which I reckon might change the world. It’s not an iPad. (Although did you hear that Apple sold three million of those in the first weekend? Three million! And no one even knows what they’re for yet!) It was made in China, and I bought it on eBay to see how well it worked. It’s an Ainol Elf.
Yes. An Ainol Elf. No smirking. Actually, hell, smirk all you like. They’re asking for it. They’ve got a slogan, which is the only bit on their website in English, and it says ‘Enjoy Life, Enjoy Ainol’. You can imagine all these proud Chinese technology executives, doing dignified presentations to western businessmen, and completely not understanding why they are all laughing so much.
‘But what is it?’ you’re probably wondering. ‘What does it do, this Ainol Elf, besides offer up the opportunity for Hobbit-themed porn jokes?’ Basically, it is an iPad. Although not really. It runs Google’s Android operating system, which is what you’ve probably got on your phone if it’s not an iPhone or a BlackBerry. It’s not quite as good as an iPad, truth be told, although it does all the same stuff. And it costs £70.
An iPad costs £400. This, £70. Am I making this exciting enough? Are you getting the ‘it might change the world’ vibes I’m intending? I’m worried that you might not be. That’s the problem with this stuff. You either get it, or you don’t, and most people very happily don’t. Really, this is like writing a column trying to get people excited over a new pen. But imagine, just for a moment, that pens had always been something that most people in the world couldn’t afford. Then suddenly they could. That’s what we’re talking about here.
Sure, I could afford an iPad. In fact, the wife has one. But 1.5 billion Chinese will never afford an iPad. A billion Indians will never afford an iPad, nor a billion Africans. Lots of them will afford this. It’s the thing we’ve all been waiting for; the paradigm shift of household computing from luxury to commodity. It’s massive. It’s probably the most important thing you’ll read about this year. I just wish that there was a way of making it sound a bit more interesting.
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Mad Men, the glorious American drama about life in a 1960s Manhattan advertising firm, returned this week. (Perhaps I was watching it, using the Sky app, on my Ainol Elf. Yes.) Amid the thousands of words that have been written about it, by awestruck critics and desperate lifestyle writers, none have managed to explain why the previous four seasons have been worth watching. I love the show, but I couldn’t tell you why either. Almost nothing happens. What little does happen, happens suddenly and is never explained. Characters are opaque, and stay that way. The sex is largely implied, there are no guns, and there is never a car chase. What’s to like? Can it really be that the clothes carry the whole thing?
We had a Mad Men-themed housewarming party last year, the wife and I. It was odd. For the first hour, unless you paid close attention to hemlines and tie-clips, you could have been at any smart youngish function; any wedding or engagement party. Usually, though, as the hours pass and the booze flows, people get scruffier. Ties are loosened, shirts come out, hair waves free. Not here. The fancy-dress aspect kept standards high. People would regularly retreat to our bathroom to shoot their cuffs and comb.
It meant that we all got wasted. Lacking all the usual indicators of drunken dishevelment, no one knew when to stop. And it left me thinking. Imagine if in Mad Men the same stuff happened, but they all wore T-shirts and jeans. It would be rubbish.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for The Times
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