At Las Vegas airport I thought I had seen the future. ‘Send a digital postcard’ said the sign on top of a bunch of these things, with one in the middle showing a changing display of scenes of the city.
‘250 stunning high resolution views of Las Vegas’, read the blurb. They did look good. Too good as it turned out.
The technology moves so fast nowadays that you start wondering if it’s feasible to do this.
Mentally you list the requirements: a NAND to hold the pictures, a controller to flip them, some sort of cheap polymer screen or maybe something clever from E-Ink or Seiko-Epson in the ink-jet printing department which I hadn’t heard about.
Could it be possible?
It was the hi-res claim which gave it away. That definitely wasn’t possible.
Moving in for closer inspection it turned out simply to be a very jazzy envelope with a CD-ROM inside.
What a swizz.
But good old McCarran airport. They have easy access, absolutely buckshee WiFi with a good strong signal, which means I can post this on the EW site without the hassle of paying for half an hour of some crummy operator's time who’ll make me fill in a long form full of personal details which they’ll doubtless use irresponsibly.