With its innovation, its sense of how consumers react to technology, its market leadership in audio-visual gadgets, and its interests in films, television and music, few companies seemed better placed to ride the next wave of the Internet the transition from a largely text-based web to one rich in sound and video.
Besides delivering visual stimulation, this gadget does something more profound -- it blocks it.
Google isn't the only company that's working on perceptive mobile devices, and it won't be the only one that helps bring gadgets with visual intelligence to market.
The film was described as taking James Bond "back to his roots", similar to From Russia with Love, where the focus was on character and plot rather than the high-tech gadgets and visual effects that were strongly criticised in Die Another Day.
It seems our entire culture is enmeshed in a thicket of electronic gadgets for bugging, visual surveillance and computer monitoring, which all but put the traditional private detective out of business.
The rumormill has been suggesting that a white variation of the BlackBerry 9700 was in the works for a few months now – but so far, it's managed to stay far from the visual reaches of any interested gadget gossiper with a camera.
But there are enough gadgets and cool visuals to make me hopeful.
Chinese artist Mabonona is reappraising this by turning the components of our gadgets and computers into visual art that anyone can appreciate, even if you don't have a circuit bender's understanding of what it all does.
The Disney Magic Desktop features a 2D "gadget tray" that displays bold visual icons for easy access to applications.
In Breaking the Spell, Dennett quotes Pascal Boyer, who suggests that music is a supernormal stimulus which mimics and heightens the effects of speech, and that we make symmetrical patterns with textiles, buildings, gadgets to deliberately "overstimulate [our] visual cortex".
