Have you ever looked at images on your phone and wished you could smell them? Yeah, me neither. But Japanese company ChatPerf has created a device that integrates smells into phones anyway. The plug-in—about the size of a USB stick—attaches to the iPhone’s 30-pin connector. The gadget includes a tiny “tank” that contains a particular smell. Once it’s attached to the iPhone, a screen appears with a “puff” button. If a user presses the button, the device releases a scent.

Apparently, the intention of the product is to enable mobile phone users to send scents to one another in addition to sounds and images. ChatPerf foresees the device being applied to gaming as well as movies shown on mobile devices.

The real question isn’t necessarily how the gadget will work, but who even cares? Early Hollywood tried to introduce smells into movies through products such as the Smell-O-Vision, Smell-O-Rama and Aromarama, and they all flopped. If people didn’t care to smell the movies, why on Earth would they want to smell their phones? Granted technology has come a long way since 1960’s “Scent of Mystery,” the only film to ever utilize the Smell-O-Vision, but who wants to be sniffing their phones? In my opinion: No one does.

ChatPerf isn’t the only company to try and bring smell back to multi-media, however. In March, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology’s Haruka Matsukura showcased his invention, the smelling screen, at Orlando’s IEEE Virtual Reality conference. The technology makes smells exude from the exact spot a corresponding image is displayed on any LCD screen.

How does the smelling screen work? Vaporizing gel pellets continuously feed odors into four air streams, one on each corner of the screen. The air streams are then blown from the screen’s surface using fans. The strength and direction of the fans are adjusted to move the scent to given areas of the screen. Currently, the system can only pump one smell at a time, but Matsakura plans a second phase of the technology incorporating cartridges, similar to those used in printers, which will allow the smells to be changed.

Given the choice of smelling my phone or a movie on television, I choose the latter. Although I’d hate to think what kind of smell exudes from the TV when a character farts, let alone the shit break scene in “American Pie.”