I keep telling friends and Operation Gadget readers that you shouldn’t look at the major gadget sites like Engadget for credible discussion of fitness gadgets and sports technology. The editors of that site have adopted a sneering point of view toward the stuff that we’re interested in.
There’s no better example of this attitude than the article Nokia intros 5140i fitness phone. For illustrative purposes, I’ll quote from it and place emphasis where I think the tone is most negative:
All right, fitness geeks, Nokia’s got sumthin’ for you. The 5140i is a tri-band handset designed for “active-minded consumers” (as opposed to the rest of us sluggishly-minded folk) that offers dust and splash resistance and “durability,” which is apparently not a feature found in other phones. The deal with this mobile is it pairs up with special fitness-related software on Polar wrist computers (yeah, that means they’re watches) to download training data to your phone after a workout. The software keeps track of stats you fitness-types need to know, like heartrate and other various sundries (we wouldn’t have any idea– they never let us out of Engadget HQ)….
I won’t get personal with the author of this piece because I’m pretty sure that the tone is an affectation that they’ve decided impresses some segment of their audience. What hipster sub-demographic likes this attitude?
You know, this reminds me of life in my high school. There was a large group of people back then who wanted to be good at the sports they participated in, they just wanted others to think that they did it effortlessly. When they thought nobody was looking they practiced as hard or harder than the serious athletes, but if you pointed this out they’d say, “Nah, I’m just out here to have fun,” and they’d slow down to a jog.
Most of us young suburbanites grew out of such tendencies years ago. Isn’t it time for Engadget to grow up too?