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Someone finally did something useful with the awesome shape of the Boxee Box

Someone finally did something useful with the awesome shape of the Boxee Box

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It's extremely difficult to come up with a novel shape for a gadget. There are only so many shapes, and most devices are best served as rectangles anyway. Rectangles can stack, they're pretty easy to hold, cat videos can play on them, so on. We live in a rectangular world.

Boxee Box

But then Boxee Box came along. At first blush, it's just a failed set-top in a sea of generic set-tops — but that shape! It's a cube being swallowed by the surface beneath it, a buoy floating in a sea of digital content. It's awesome. It's fun to look at. It's refreshing, even if it meant you couldn't stack other devices on top of it.

Long live the sinking cube

I missed that shape, but a Canadian manufacturer of phone and Bluetooth accessories brought it back. Farbe Technik's Portable Bluetooth Speaker makes up in style what it lacks in creative naming, a half-sunk cube blasting streamed audio at a 30-degree angle. It's available in six colors for around $50.

I certainly can't vouch for the speaker's sound quality — Farbe Technik's booth is outdoors, where the sounds of Vegas and CES are permanent and inescapable — but I might just have to buy it anyway.

Long live the sinking cube.

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