And our children programming robots

By Mike / On / In Technology

You know what I love about Android?

One thing: the mascot. How can you not love Andy the Android? It’s the one thing they really got right; the one well executed detail they didn’t just copy over from iOS.

Seeing Droid Charge as the promoted topic on Twitter made me realize what an opportunity they missed with their whole branding.

What if, instead of a Droid Charge, it’s a Charge Droid, another in a long line of cute little robots that do useful things for you.

Smart Phones are for nerds, and iPhones are for nerds in turtlenecks. People love robots, not big scary robots, but cute, slightly buggy robots, like the Star Wars droids from which Droid licensed its name.

George Lucas and his crew get how to make a robot friendly, even lovable. Google and their crew do not.

The robots in the Droid commercials are scary. Disembodied alien arms researching humans using the Minority Report fork of Android. Horrifying.

Ask a nerd to design a robot and he’ll design the perfect killing machine, programmed to punish purveyors of wedgies worldwide.

That’s not the kind of robot people fall in love with. That’s the kind of robot people fear. Getting people to fear technology is not the challenge.

Imagine if a Droid actually looked like Andy, and behaved like him too. Imagine if the Android SDK was for programming an android instead of a cheap iPhone knock-off.

Imagine if Google bought Tapbots, and our children programming robots.