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Technology is all around us, we are forced to trust it at every turn. We trust it to keep track of how much cash we actually have in the bank, we trust it to count that cash and give it to us in the street. Technology is responsible for making sure our train gets us to work on time, and technology makes sure that your dinner does not burn in the oven whilst you are watching The Simpsons. It is unavoidable; we have to trust technology many times a day.

But we can take things too far, some technology is imprecise at best, most people realise this and adjust their behaviour, many do not with disastrous consequences. Let us consider some of the startling road traffic accidents that have been caused by a drive following their GPS unit too closely.

In the USA, a bus driver, carrying a girls softball team as passengers, blindly followed his GPS unit under a low bridge, far too low for his bus, and sheared off the roof. Ignoring the large yellow signs that were screaming LOW CLEARENCE! At him, the driver proceeded under the bridge, as he believed the GPS unit was set to truck/bus mode and trusted its judgement. A spokesman for the bus company was quoted as saying “We just thought it would be a safe route because, why else would they have a selection for a bus?” which just goes to prove that people are somewhat dumb sometimes.

In the UK, a female motorist was following directions to Carmarthen, she was following here GPS unit and came to a closed railway crossing that was not highlighted on the unit. She decided the GPS was right (mind boggling) and that the crossing was not real (even more mind boggling) and proceeded to life the first of the closed gates (idiot alert). She drove her car onto the tracks and climbed out and went to open the gate on the other side of the crossing. She was completely amazed when a train came along and totally trashed her car! I mean, how stupid can a person get?

Again in the UK, a driver was following his GPS unit through the village of Luckington (appropriate name) and was not paying attention to the actual conditions outside of the vehicle. His GPS unit directed him onto a bridge which crosses the River Avon.  Unfortunately, the bridge had been closed for repairs for over a week, the car drove straight off the incomplete bridge and into the river. When local residents were asked to comment on the accident they replied that it was nothing uncommon and that they had been pulling an average of two cars a day out of the river for the past week! One resident told that when questioned, the drivers often replied with something along the lines of “My sat-nav told me it was this way”.

GPS accidents are now becoming a common occurrence, frequently lethal and easily avoided by following proper operating instructions.

The granddaddy of cool gadget manufacturers must arguably be the Wenger Company. Don’t know who they are? Ok three words… Swiss Army Knife. They are the current manufacturers of this world famous gadget that has become as much a status symbol as a useful gadget. I say current manufacturer, as originally the Swiss army knife was made by a company named Victorinox, but after some commercial manoeuvring, manufacturing was taken over by the Wenger Corporation in the early 90s. Oddly enough, Victorinox purchased the Wenger Corporation in 2005; it is a strange world we live in.

With a long history of excellent pocket knife design behind them, I was surprised to find a really rather ludicrous product in their line-up. Namely the exceptionally well named “Giant”. This crazy knife has a staggering 85 separate tools built into it and weighs in at a ridiculous 2lb. certainly not something you would want to carry around in your pocket!

Some of the more extreme additions to the veritable garage full of tools and devices which hide away into this Swiss army knife are:

• Golf club face cleaner – Why include this? What use is it when all you need is a pocket knife with a normal blade to do the same job?

• Golf shoe spike wrench – For those golfers who actually notice they have a loose spike and decide to make instant repairs on the fairway.

• Watch case back opening tool – Useful for those life and death threatening moments when you feel you need to take the back from your watch and start fiddling with the gears.

• Telescopic pointer – When a finger just won’t do!

• Shortix laboratory key – I don’t even know where the Shortix laboratory is, so why do I need a key for it? They should change the locks.

• Toothpick – Not a bad idea, but on a 2lb knife the size of a house brick, one wonders who would have the strength and dexterity to manoeuvre this small piece of metal into their mouth and extract the popcorn stuck between their molars.

I must admit I thought it was a joke when I first found details of the “Giant”, but no, it is a true production model of the Swiss army knife, ok it was created as a special anniversary model but even so, it is on sale to the general public.

Current owners of the Giant are somewhat taken aback that the model was produced too early to include the newly patented Wenger finger clipping tool, so we can expect a new model some time possibly named “Super Giant” or some other amazingly inventive name.

All joking aside, the manufacturers of the Swiss army brand have consistently created high quality and useful products for decades, it is quite a shame to see them making something of a laughing stock of themselves by falling so deeply into the “bigger is better” line of thinking.

As a child I was always fascinated by all things robotic, much of this fascination was generated by the TV shows of the time, such as Star Trek and re-runs of Lost in Space. I was a sensible kid, I fully realised this fantastic mechanical devices that were walking and talking, displaying true sentience, were far beyond our technology at the time. I did think that we might see something very similar emerge in the future, definitely within my lifetime. So thirty years on from my young TV watching days, where are the robots?

You would think that after 30 years of incredible technological advances that here would be some recognisable for of commercial robotics? Certainly something that was a close match to my boyhood daydreams, but no, we are stuck with ridiculously expensive children’s toys as the pinnacle of robotic science.

Let’s take a look at one of these advanced robotic life forms shall we? Queue drum roll….. It’s Pleo the Robotic Camerasaurs! Can this really be the most advanced form of publically available robot known to mankind? Let’s take a look!

Pleo retails for around $299, making him a rather expensive electronic toy. He contains (hold a second, why am I calling it a he?) a range of sensory devices that enable him to hear, see, sense touch and detect objects. Anybody who remembers Furbies (those cute if somewhat annoying electronic pets) will be familiar with the whole concept of Pleo, he is just a rather more advanced version of the same thing. The manufacturers state that no two of the toys will develop the same habits, and his entire development is based upon the time the owner spends with him. Due to the fact he can only operate (be awake?) for an hour on a full battery charge and then needs four hours to recharge the owner isn’t really going to be spending much time with him.

The core of Pleo’s brain is Life OS; an impressively named piece of software that it would seem is designed to make something wag its tale when you feed it something it cannot eat anyway. I’m in the wrong business! This software has recently been updated to Life OS 1.1, brain surgery for your robotic pet!

Pleo can react to his surroundings and will display character traits such as sadness, happiness and excitement in a variety of ways, he will also let his owner know when he is tired or hungry. Many of his responses are geared towards affectionate actions such as petting and play.

As you can probably guess, I am not exactly impressed with this particular gadget. Quite frankly it is nothing new, ok the technology is more up to date than previous attempts at the same thing, but there is certainly nothing innovative about Pleo, and unless you are the kind of person who can afford to blow $299 on a toy that is likely to be forgotten within a week I can’t see the value of him.

There have been lots of gadgets that became cult items, such as the Tamagotchi (that weird digital pet thing), the Apple iPod (love or hate them, they are everywhere), and the Commodore 64 (considered the premier home PC of its era). It is very hard to try and attribute the title of Ultimate Cult Gadget to any one item.

My choice is going to be the Technics SL 1210 turntable. Why am I choosing this as my ultimate cult gadget of all time? Simply because unlike most gadgets, this one actually did an awful lot to encourage people to develop skills and get involved in new things, instead of hanging on a key chain looking pretty.

The SL 1210, is the best known DJ turntable hands down, it is a veritable industry standard in the DJ world and is used by everyone from back bedroom wannabes to $1,000 per minute super star DJ’s. This is truly a gadget that breaks into a huge cross section of the intended target market. The sight of a pair of 1210s has become synonymous with the image of a DJ. So why are these decks so popular? Why do people love them so much?

Firstly we need to consider the design. They contain every function needed by a DJ, and supply these functions in a single, easy to operate and robust package. All of the components are of extremely high standard, these things just keep working. Because of the great value they represent, they were quickly adopted as a standard part of the average club sound system. Of course, if you are a DJ in waiting, and you want to break into the club scene, then you had better practice on something that is the same as the equipment you will eventually work on right? So within a very short space of time, every aspiring DJ had a pair of 1210s on their Christmas list. This was a typical snowball effect, and sales of the SL 1210 grew exponentially.

Getting back to why I chose this as my ultimate cult gadget of all time, we need to consider what the SL 1210 is all about. It is about mixing music, entertaining people, learning how to play a pair of decks and having fun. Other gadgets just simply allow you to do something; the SL 1210 offers you the chance to be something. From the youngest teenager with his pair of turntables plugged into some old Hi-Fi system in his bedroom, to the international DJ’s who entertain crowds in excess of 50,000 people, all of them are following a dream, and living a lifestyle, of which the Technics SL 1210 turntable is a fundamentally important building block. Can the same be said about the iPod? Not in the slightest.

So this is why the 1210 gets my vote as the ultimate cult gadget of all time, a truly exceptional product, which for many people has changed their world.

In 1991, Sony unveiled a new form of recordable media, the MiniDisc. It was heralded as the replacement technology for the audio cassette tape, in many ways it was going to be the ultimate gadget of the early 1990s now almost 20 years later it has almost disappeared, why should such an innovative technology just fade away?

The largest problem with the MiniDisc format was the fact it was not taken up as a mainstream recording media by major music publishers. It was expensive to produce and the cost of the original MiniDisc players was extremely high. Due to these two huge issues, the MiniDisc never became a well accepted form of music distribution.

Within a few short years of the MiniDisc being launched, the CD was introduced as an extremely cheap and very accurate type of media for music reproduction. The CD was even more cost effective than the old audio cassette, and it was quickly adopted by the music industry. The fate of the MiniDisc was sealed; it had been superseded before it was even established.

Further competition was forthcoming in the form of MP3 file compression. With the up rise of the large peer-to-peer file sharing systems such as Kazaa, people began literally stealing most of their music, record companies were forced to cut prices and offer added value to consumers in an effort to entice them to purchase original recordings. The MiniDisc could not compete cost wise in this cutthroat market. Once the boom in solid state MP3 players was well underway, MiniDisc lost it’s only remaining advantage over other recording media as a very portable and reliable way of transporting and playing recorded music.

The MiniDisc is still extremely popular with musicians and music editors. The superior way in which it stores and accesses data makes it immensely useful for people who need to edit audio date on the fly. The MiniDisc still has many supporters, although it is becoming more and more difficult to source new equipment and even the media itself is becoming difficult to obtain.

In a controversial move, Sony revisited and refreshed the technology in 2004 by releasing the HiMD. This is a 1GB general storage device, capable of storing both audio and data on the same media. It was backwardly compatible with the older MiniDisc format and has the same physical dimensions. This format has been quickly accepted by professional musicians and music editors as a superior way of storing and manipulating music date.

The history of the MiniDisc is a story of a gadget that was introduced at the wrong time. Although it displayed superior characteristics to any competing product at launch, the world was not ready for an expensive high quality way of storing music, instead it was screaming out for a cheap and reliable replacement for the old and unreliable audio cassette.