Polaroid’s CES booth might be the saddest thing I’ve seen all show. It isn’t your typical “booth — it’s huge and filled to the gills with products — but the contents inside show what happens when a brand collapses into itself.
Image: Christina Warren/Gizmodo
To be fair, Polaroid makes some good stuff. It’s new Pop Instant camera looks neat — if a tad overpriced — but Polaroid has slowly moved away from making camera and photo-related kits to putting its name on well, everything.
Polaroid has licensed its name to all kinds of crap for years, but walking through the booth — which was breathlessly celebrating “80 years of Polaroid” — it seemed worse than ever.
Every cheap generic gadget you could imagine was on full display, all with the Polaroid logo. 3D printer? Check. Drone? Amazingly, yes. Two-in-one Android tablet running last year’s software? Yup. Crappy Android smartphone? You got it.
All the crap at Polaroid’s CES booth
And the Polaroid booth isn’t just full of Polaroid-branded crap. Other dead brands, like Sharper Image, came along for the ride too. Look at this Sharper Image VR headset and weep for a time when it was the coolest place in US shopping centres, selling the gadgets of our dreams.
Sharper Image now has terrible-looking VR helmets
Sad.
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