Infotech: when wow turns to WTF: do you care about Blackberry 10?

Today, the lemming-like blogosphere and techno-babble reproducers of fluff that passes for news are breathless about another so-called "leak." It's RIM's Blackberry 10.

First, who really, really cares? Not because it's a Blackberry, but because it's just another report of yet another smart-phone that may or may not look like the photos and may or many not have the features ascribed to it.

Take the current Samsung tablet range, for example. Several features were added, several dropped and some downgraded between the "leaks" that some media were treated to.

The word "leak" is intended to suggest that someone, somewhere, has revealed confidential commercial - indeed proprietary - information to a journalist who has been brave enough to risk the ire of the manufacturer for doing so.

Nonsense. it has long been standard operating procedure for company press (or media) relations to tell one or two favoured journos about a forthcoming product. Story placement is an early form of viral marketing. Those who don't have the story quickly replicate it (with necessary editing to avoid allegations of copyright theft or plagiarism). After all, who would want to miss out of a placement in Google News for not carrying the story that the next range of yPhone will record the user's movements and be available with a bright orange cover despite actually being a black box?

Photos of pre-production product came of age with snatched shots of cars during testing. The more cardboard and reflective stickers on the car to disguise its probable ultimate shape the better. Some photographers made their living sitting in the hedges around company test tracks or freezing their bits off to catch a white car against white snow and ice during Arctic testing. No doubt, at some time, the autorazzi would have been given a hint as to when or where to be. No one can sit in a shrub by the side of a motorway for weeks on end.

This is not new: in the 1980s, software companies would often talk about a product that did not exist or was in the early stages of production. A term was coined: vapourware. It was software about which the most tangible feature is hot air.

In the 1990s, the practice took on a new - and financially sinister - direction as dot comm companies talked up their own business - many crossing the line between PR and fraud - to raise capital and to boost share prices to levels that no sensible interpretation of the business model or financial data could support.

It's not genuinely news if it's not true and all too often the advance publicity for a product is either incomplete or deliberately misleading. "Hey, our tablet due out next year will have a 200mpx camera on the back and full digital zoom, plus the most advanced digital imaging and manipulation software ever made." Yeh, right. On launch, that will have been quietly dropped. The media that hopes to carry extensive advertising for the product won't mention it, even though it reported it when the "leak" was released. And the new 8mpx camera (no digital zoom and no editing software as standard) will be reported as a great leap forward and - for this week at least - having stolen a march on competitors.

It's those competitors who are at least a part of the target audience for the pre-release news. They will have spent resources trying to work out how the product can do what it is claimed it will do within the technical parameters of the current form factor and the costs constraints that come with competitive end-user pricing. And so competing product may be delayed and their R&D costs increased (and wasted).

And, of course, potential buyers of competing product will have waited to see the final version so as to make a comparison.

What's worse is that the pace of product release is more to do with fashion than technology. Where once the early adopter was a geek, now (s)he is simply a fashion victim. Witness the queues outside an Apple shop every time a new iPhone comes on the market. It's a phone. Nothing more, nothing less. Your life will not be greatly enriched by being the first one to own it. The last time this kind of cult was common was for the latest release from pop bands such as The Beatles and The Easy Beats. Yes, fun phone fans: you have been transported back to the mass-manipulation habits of the days of narrow lapels and trouser legs. And girls with collar length hair and fringes holding their hands to their cheeks and screaming.

But as the hyperbole of the marketing message increasingly fills the column inches that would, in an honest media, be filled with journalism not recycled press releases, the underlying message is the same: "be there or be square."

What's worse is that, like in the USA of the 1950s and 1960s, technology is being driven by planned obsolescence. Then, your car or washing machine would shake itself to pieces after three years so the cost of repair would exceed the cost of buying a new one. That's the same with IT and Comms equipment today although the way the product goes obsolete is different.

Now, if you buy the components and build your own PC, you can be almost certain that, when one part fails, it will not be possible to replace it that all the other parts will be compatible with. There are millions of PCs around the world with CD/DVD drives that do not connect to the current generation of motherboards. Those drives will have to be thrown away, just like so many other components, when a motherboard fails. Clearly, not enough of them were failing in use and therefore the only way to force replacement was to change the connectors. OK, so the new version is faster but, in the real world. very few people used the old ones to anything like their full performance capacity. Fully functional video cards are redundant because the industry decided to delete the slots they fit in. These are not "low end" cards - they were cutting edge two or three years ago and may even have been the most expensive component after the CPU. Even monitor connectors have changed, leaving three year old digital monitors orphaned.

As today's "citizen journalists" and even seasoned but lazy reporters fall over themselves to report on the next big thing (maybe) there is only one loser. The consumer.

There is a solution. Ignore pre-release product information, unless there is actual hands-on experience by the person writing the article. And don't buy version x.0 of anything. Make manufacturers slow down the pace of product release, make them test the things properly and - most importantly - don't buy anything because you think owning it will make you a better or more popular person. That's the buzz that the manufacturers and media are selling you and those around you.

And if the people you know think less of you because you don't wear the colour of the day, don't have the latest phone, car or shoes, then it's not you that should be pitied. It's them for failing to realise how little free will they exercise.

News about a possible new Blackberry? No thanks. Maybe it'll be good and maybe it won't. Shareholders in RIM aren't holding their breath. I'll wait until I can hold one and see what it actually does and how it might make my life better or more productive. And so should you. Which is why we are not carrying that or any other story about a product that might or might not exist now or at some point in the future.