you want a game with that?

Today’s announcement of the Fujifilm V10 camera at CES shows the progress we’ve made with electronics. It’s what I call the We-Will-Because-It’s-Easy factor — it’s where there’s some feature that’s so easy to implement, they can’t resist just throwing it in, even where it’s not really appropriate.

I’ve never really charted this out before but this is the rough draft of the flow:

Clock -> Alarm Clock -> Calculator -> Address Book -> MP3 Player -> Games

See, not only is Fuji’s new camera a compact 5 MP camera with a 3-inch LCD screen and a high-sensitivity CCD that can take photos up to ISO 1600, but it also has several built-in games which is, as Engadget puts it, “in case you want to burn your batteries up and miss important shots.”

Cell phones have become the de-facto platform for this kind of evolution when it comes to consumer electronics (and sure, we’ve reached Video/TV with those devices), but in terms of the kind of WWBIE that I’m talking about—like having an alarm clock in my rice cooker or an mp3 player in your sunglasses—I think the Fuji camera is a sign that perhaps we’ll see downloadable Java games for your toaster in the near future. ‘Cause nothing says progress like a little Bejeweled while you thaw a bagel.