More Is Less

As conventional wisdom would have it, less is more — and, as the managing editor for PCMag Mobile discovered at a recent product launch for a new smartphone, more can also be much less.

"Trust me," writes Sascha Segan, before getting down to details about the phone itself, "you want to hear about the insanity first." He continues to set the scene for the schizophrenic launch of the Samsung Wave:

I have my limits for a tech product event. Getting us to come to a darkened, secondary convention center in a suburb of Barcelona was fine. And when we were ushered into a room the size of half a soccer field, with a catwalk stretching down the center and four full-screen "video walls" showing ocean scenes all around us, I was still on board.

But then the MC came out, an overenthusiastic (and apparently totally unironic) Brit named Jake who declared that this was "Samsung Unpacked Episode 1: Into The New Wave." I started to think of Jar-Jar Binks.

For more on this misadventure in the world of product launch event planning — including aquatic metaphors strained to the point of breaking, interpretive dancers, and the "Spirit of Bada," whatever that is — click here.