By Stephen Schenck | October 4, 2012 9:44 AM
We’ve all heard of putting a magazine in a smartphone, right? It works a bit better on a tablet’s larger screen, but digital copies of magazines are nothing new. What about the other way around, though? In select copies of the latest Entertainment Weekly, it turns out there’s a fully-functional smartphone embedded between the pages.
This is part of an ad run by TV network The CW, designed to show reader live tweets on a tiny screen sandwiched between some magazine pages. When you think about the technology needed to receive tweets and display them like that, an off-the-shelf smartphone sure makes a lot of sense.
Indeed, upon a tear-down of the issue, a remarkably complete Android circuit board is inside. There’s a T-Mobile SIM, USB port, a hidden full QWERTY keyboard, and even a functional camera (sans lens). Apparently, this is a board from an ancient ABO smartphone, an Android 1.5 device running on a 416MHz SoC. If that’s the kind of hardware that sounds like you couldn’t even give it away – well, maybe that’s why it ended up harvested for parts and squeezed between the pages of a magazine.
Still, it’s incredibly cool that someone even did this in the first place. With a little work, it’s supposedly possible to make voice calls with the hardware. Before you get too excited about all the hacky possibilities, this ad’s only in 1,000 copies of EW, total, available on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles. What a tease!
