08/12/2014

I can't believe there is such a thing as a selfie stick!


Now we spend a percentage of our lives taking selfies, I suppose its inevitable that the act has inspired an aide to help us take even better ones. As we know the distance from which you can take a selfie is entirely dictated by the length of your arms so an enterprising designer has come with a way of extending your reach.  The rather unglamorously named selfie stick is not just a stick of course, that would be too simple.

A selfie stick, yesterday
There are three basic types. One is a Bluetooth enabled design linked to your phone, another can be plugged into your phone’s headphone jack. On both of these you press a button on the handle. The third type are ones without any remote function.
Each are designed to be held at arm’s length dramatically adding to the field of vision that a regular selfie would not encompass, particularly if you’re trying to fit a number of people into the picture. Which, incidentally, is surely not really a selfie? As you can’t really describe it as a group someone needs to think of a different name – what about crowdie? Selfie sticks originated in South East Asia but now sell around the world; in early December Amazon apparently sold out such was the demand. Most brands are made in China and sell for between $14 and $40.
Those in the know don’t recommend the ones without any remote function and say the best one is the make that uses a headphone cable. This means you don’t need to worry about pairing or charging; the button works directly from the headphone jack and is a cheaper option than the Bluetooth one. This is probably only the starts as you can imagine some weird hybrid of a selfie stick and a remote control drone being able to float about your person taking photos on your vocal commands.  No doubt improved functionality of some sort will follow and before too long render the selfie stick obsolete. Then we won’t hear about it again for decades till some tv show lists it amongst the 100 Silliest Products of the 2010s. Probably hosted by Alex Zane.

1 comment:

  1. "You can imagine some weird hybrid of a selfie stick and a remote control drone being able to float about your person taking photos" - imagine no longer: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/torquing/zano-autonomous-intelligent-swarming-nano-drone

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