Polaroid 2.0

There has been much sadness over Polaroid's decision to discontinue making the iconic box cameras that produced instant, rectangular pictures. Polaroid, realizing they really did have a great thing, are releasing a more modern solution: an palm-sized printer that will instantly print photos beamed from a cell phone camera. Within 30 seconds, you'll have a full-colour image you can pass on right there and then.

"The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150," the NY Times says. "The images are 2 inches by 3 inches, the size of a credit card. The new printers are so lightweight that a Polaroid executive demonstrating them recently had three tucked unnoticeably into various pockets of his trim jacket, whipping them out as if he were Harpo Marx.

"The printer opens like a compact with a neat, satisfying click. Inside, no cartridges or toner take up space. Instead, there is a computer chip, a 2-inch-long thermal printhead and a novel kind of paper embedded with microscopic layers of dye crystals that can create a multitude of colors when heated."

The white framed photographs were so beloved, websites were launched in memory of the old school apparatus.