A few nights ago I was watching The Closer — one of my very favorite shows — and during a crucial scene in which the Major Crimes squad is closing in on tracking down two suspects, one officer after another comes into the Chief’s office to deliver a new piece of information. One member of the squad, Lt. Tao, is the tech geek of the group. His bit of information was that he’d located the address of the suspects and had a picture of the location on his phone.

On your PHONE? Someone asked with far, far too much emphasis.

Yes, on his phone. Tao proceeds to flip the screen up and, oh, look at that, a T-Mobile G1. If I wasn’t aware that this phone was called a G1, a shot of the back of it revealed G1 in huge white letters on the back of the screen. (I don’t think that exists in actual, real-life models of said phone. I could be wrong.)

There is some more waving the phone around. Chief Johnson wants to see this picture of the address (provided by Google Maps/Google Street View) for herself. She grabs at the phone, but Tao says, “Let me e-mail it to you.”

I think at this point someone actually exclaimed, again far too emphatically: E-MAIL!?

Yes, show, we get it. The G1 is a marvel. You can see maps on it and it can send e-mail. Woo.

I don’t usually mind product placement. I don’t know if most people even register the model of the laptops and other computer equipment TV people use. I do, usually because I find it funny or I’m scoffing. But man, this was a bit beyond.

So anyway, just so you know, the fake LAPD Major Crimes Squad prefers the T-Mobile G1 for finding pictures of suspects’ houses. And E-MAIL!?

Tags: Android, cell phones, product placement, smartphones, T-Mobiloe G1

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Product, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.