Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Portable: Practical or preposterous?

It appears that some inventors have decided that the market for portable wares is severely lacking, and therefor have taken upon themselves to make sure nobody ever has to stray far from their precious microwave, pizza oven, or toilet. I mean, what happens if I go out one day and all of the sudden an urgent need arises for a Karaoke machine?? I would feel quite the fool caught out unprepared like that, wouldn't you? Here are some unusual portable inventions. Practical or preposterous? you be the judge!




Always stop and consider before buying something portable that would normally not get carried around! When faced with products like this, always stop and ask yourself two all important questions... 1) What are the design flaws? 2) When would I use this?





Portable rooms. Ok, so "portable room" sounds potentially pretty cool, right? Right, and that's exactly how they get you. What are the design flaws? Well to start with, things that roll when you don't want them to tend get really annoying really fast. Making a bed suite or an office light enough to be portable causes a bit of a problem when you go to lean on your desk or forget and jump in to bed. Your desk wants to go forward, your rolling chain wants to go backward, and you yourself suddenly have no control in the matter. Hello, floor, i'd forgotten how hard and cold you are... The other design flaw is revealed by the second and most important question. When would I use this? That's easy. Unless you're overly fond of complications, you wouldn't. Really, where are you going to go that one of these would be practical? Unless, of course, you happen to be staying at a hotel that requires you to bring your own furniture... Or if you feel like taking a snooze at the park with all the comforts of home.





We have a crappy singing emergency on our hands, people! Seriously now, who needs this?





This is a portable manual bread toaster, complete with animated graphics to indicate how toasted the bread gets. Here's an idea, eat toast at home and have something else while your out and about! II think it's a pretty safe bet that this thing browns the very outside of the bread and that's about it. I don't know about you guys, but I think I can live without mobile toast.





Now that's kinda cool, I might actually come up with an reason to use that.





Hmmm. Yes? No? Personally I think i'll just stick with microwaving things at home...





This would be quite handy if you happened not to have electricity.





There's a reason so many Americans are getting fat, and its called the portable pizza oven. Seriously? You cant wait until you get home to have your pizza?





Um, NO. This is a serious fail by Japan based Niban Too Corporation. As the leading contributor to the dumb inventions industry one would think Japan would have learned a great deal by now from all those mistakes. Normally one would be right, but the obviously the concept of learning from your fails does not exist over there. Maybe you guys are cool with literally carrying shit around in your briefcase, but the rest of us don't do that.





Portable espresso maker. Uhh, STARBUCKS! Ok, to be fair this would be great for camping, but it would totally make my day to see some dumbass driving down the road trying to make espresso in the car.





Toilet car seat. Dude, what?? If I had a car there would be a few concrete rules, the first being: keep it in your pants and DON'T PISS IN THE FUCKING CAR!





Portable bathtub. We've been living for hundreds of years without carrying our bathtubs around, why change that?





No. Try again.