If there's one thing that nerds love, it's Star Trek. So on some level, it's not a great surprise that there was all sorts of excitement this morning about this Bluetooth Star Trek: The Original Series Communicator.

Made by The Wand Company, the gadget certainly looks the part. It's a Bluetooth headset made of metal and plastic with a smart magnetic stand to charge it. The Communicator was designed and built using high quality 3D scans of the "real" communicator prop, and it plays the right sounds, too. As a piece of Star Trek memorabilia it's hard to fault, and I'm sure there will be plenty of people who want to buy it despite its $149.95 pre-order price. Units won't ship until January of next year.

But as a piece of technology, gosh, isn't Star Trek terrible? I was using a similar communicator replica back in about 2005. Back then, it wasn't called a communicator, though; it was called a Motorola RAZR V3. While that supported Bluetooth, it wasn't some mere accessory—it was an entire telephone. It did e-mail. I could even look at the Web's feeble sibling using WAP. It had a power that the Star Trek writers and designers couldn't even imagine.

Leap forward a decade and smartphones are abundant. The communicator—with its buttons, grilles, and limited functionality (it doesn't even have a camera!)—looks positively archaic.

It all makes me wonder: how on earth did the Federation manage to colonize space without even having the power to send a selfie or use emoji? Even text messages were a technological step further than the Enterprise could boast. But perhaps this is how they did it; their dumbphone tech freed them from the endless distractions that plague our lives today so they could actually go out and prosper.