Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Says Using Android Smartphones & Tablets Is “Emasculating”

(12:24 pm PDT, Feb 27th)

bringoogleglass

Speaking in front of an audience at TED today, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a bizarre pitch for buying his company’s wearable Google Glass headset, essentially by arguing that product utilizing one of his company’s biggest projects — Android — were effeminate and made for wussies.

Speaking in Long Beach, California, Brin said:

“Brin told the audience that smartphones are “emasculating.” “You’re standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass,” he said.

Using Google Glass requires a fair bit of rubbing as well, and the prototypes have fewer hardware features than most phones. But Brin said they improved on smartphones in certain ways, particularly in having a camera ever-ready to start snapping pictures. (The same camera is also the source of the most serious privacy concerns raised by Glass.)

In other words, not only did Brin claim that one of Google’s major projects, Android — an operating system that runs mostly on “featureless pieces of glass” like smartphones and tablets — was “emasculating,” he is also essentially arguing that carrying a smartphone around in your pocket makes you look stupider than wearing a computer on your face 24 hours a day.

A very poor choice of words, indeed. Google’s PR department must be doing spins.

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Comment »

  • josephz2va

    Maybe they’re getting ready to spin a pink slip on him?

  • http://profiles.google.com/sigzero Robert X

    Has he seen this picture you have of him? That is irony.

    • lucascott

      I know. Every time I see him I think about all the woman that will never sleep will him

  • aardman

    I just had en epiphany. Google Glass is going to be a mega flop. It might be an impressive technological achievement but the guy wearing it wiill not be welcome everywhere he goes. Who wants to talk with a guy who just might be continually photographing/videoing you while you’re talking? Would you like that guy to be talking with your daughter? Would that guy be welcome in banks, military bases, federal offices, national monuments, museums, movie houses and theaters, health clubs, power plants, water filtration plants, airliners, airports, jewellers, embassies, armaments factories, strip joints, casinos, schools, hospitals, courthouses, his boss’s office and lastly your house? What woman would go on a date with that guy? Which waitress would want to serve that guy? Which sales clerk will want to entertain that guy?

    If you want to be instantly branded as a creepy stalker geek, go ahead, where those glasses. Then go walking around the local girls gymnastics meet to cement your social outcast status.

    It’s a stupid, offensively intrusive, privacy-violating product. You heard it here first. Fail. As big a fail as that Segway thing that was supposed to take over the nation’s sidewalks and corridors but had to settle for the the mall cop business.

  • David Colley

    I guess has a new employee benefit. Doping during lunch breaks.

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Android, as well as our sister site, Cult of Mac. He has written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with his charming inamorata and two tiny budgerigars punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous perverts. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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