Image: Christina Warren/Gizmodo

Polaroid’s CES booth might be the saddest thing I’ve seen all show. It’s not your typical “sad” CES booth—it’s huge and filled to the gills with products—but the contents inside show what happens when a brand collapses into itself.


To be fair, Polaroid makes some good stuff. It’s new Pop Instant camera looks neat—if a tad overpriced—but Polaroid has slowly moved away from making camera and photo-related kit to putting its name on well, everything.

Polaroid has licensed its name to all kinds of crap for years, but walking through the booth—which was breathlessly celebrating “80 years of Polaroid”—it seemed worse than ever.


Every cheap generic gadget you could imagine was on full display, all with the Polaroid logo. 3D printer? Check. Drone? Amazingly, yes. 2-in-1 Android tablet running last year’s software? Yup. Shitty Android smartphone? You got it.

All the crap at Polaroid’s CES booth

And the Polaroid booth isn’t just full of Polaroid-branded crap. Other dead brands, like Sharper Image came along for the ride too. Look at this Sharper Image VR headset and weep for a time when it was the coolest place in the mall, selling the gadgets of our dreams.



Sharper Image now has terrible-looking VR helmets


Sad.

