O2, the Joggler and the family fridge

Last night my eye was drawn to a new campaign from O2 promoting its calendar service and associated product the Joggler. Like all good campaigns it made me want to find out more about the service which allowed you to organise your life through a device that ran a family diary and sent sent reminder texts to your phones for important dates etc.

The reality of the service is that you of course need to be registered with O2 and have an O2 phone to get the best benefit. Although if you are, you do not need to shell out £149 for the Joggler itself you can just use the calendar app on your PC. So once you realise that you don't need the Joggler box to use the calendar what is left?

Well the box can store and display photo's and can be used as a music player (however it does not supported Apples AAC format). Digital radio is coming in December so hard luck if you buy one now and it has traffic updates from traffic master (useful in a kitchen) and news from sky news.

The advert tries to explain that the Joggler allows you to clear up all the clutter from the family fridge from children's pictures to reminders. Of course as someone with a 13 month old, what they have forgotten is that i don't want to see a picture of what my Son has created on a digital screen, its actually nice to see the real thing.

I hope that this was another attempt at creating a digital hub for the home rather than just creating a product because they could, but i fail to see how this justifies its place on that journey. It is limited in its application and you can do more things by having a notebook permanently in the kitchen which might cost a bit more but it would do an awful lot more. The ability to access the web for recipes for a start!

If you are on O2 for your mobile phone then the calendar, which can be found here: http://yourfamily.o2.co.uk/o2familycalendar), would be a very useful tool however i would stick to that and ignore the joggler.