Do you watch minitrends come and go, wishing you’d joined in or at least made some snarky comment at the end of a news article about one?

Trendspotting is as much a trendy habit amongst the chattering classes as trainspotting used to be amongst the pocket watch clattering crowds.

Rich or poor, famous or obscure, we live and die, don’t we, as trends pass us by?

Billions of heads bobbing up and down in the soup of life we call our planetary atmosphere.

Will South Koreans stop chasing advanced college degrees in order to get good paying jobs because there aren’t enough jobs for people with tonnes of knowledge shoved into their neurons?

Will the U.S. continue to see a rise in minimum-wage jobs that count toward full employment, even if the workers themselves are underemployed?

How long can the billions, many climbing up to minimum wage jobs and many falling down into minimum wage jobs, survive on promises until the equilibrium is unethically inequal?  Promises compared to what?

These questions I ponder as I process the information I read from a product announcement made earlier today in New York City.

Plenty of people seemed desperate to tell me how great the newest Nokia smartphones will be in someone’s life, if not mine.

It was like listening to futurists tell me they were finally delivering the promises of yesterday’s future visions — flying cars, elevators to the Moon and immortality — that had already fallen out of fashion, no matter how fascinating, technically speaking.

All in a platform that seemed like something I’d seen before…iPod nano:

Versus the latest announcement, the Nokia Lumia 920:

What, no click wheel?  lol

Anyway, looks like the Ballmer/Elop/Harlow ship continues to spring leaks, but not the good kind.  Innovation is not the same as the “cool factor” that eludes many companies unaware of or unable to capture the zeitgeist for their personal use when trying to wow us with unavailable gizmos not a part of our general social sphere.

I think my mind is made up (and I don’t have a mind!) — without pricing or release date for the Nokia/Windows8 phones to go on, and the Nokia 800/900 being a Windows 7 deadend (or nearly so), I’m throwing my money at Samsung and one of its smartphones — probably the Galaxy SIII but possibly the Note II because having a phablet is the whole point of my venture into the smartphone world.

[And Hezbollah, you can kick my shiny, white Aston Martin.]