Smartphone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

To start off my next day at CES I was scheduled to meet with UTStarcom. I made my way through the show floor and found their booth, but was disappointed to hear that UTStarcom won't be making any product announcements at the show this year. Instead they wanted to tell me about all of their success stories from last year - argh. In the end I did manage to get a little information out of the person I was talking with. She told me that UTStarcom will be releasing a entry level Windows Mobile device at some point this year. Can't you just feel the thrill and excitement building? Heh, you heard it here first!

I made my way to the Jawbone booth in the parking lot where you could exchange your current headset for a Jawbone. I happily tossed my Motorola headset into their bin and they paired a Jawbone with my BlackJack. At first I found the headset to be awkward to get on and harder to get it to stay put. Perhaps I have Dumbo ears or something. But I couldn't get it to fit right. I spent the remainder of the show and trip home testing it out. It wasn't until a week later at the NRF trade show in New York when I was talking to a person by the name of Daniel Hopping. I noticed Daniel was using the Jawbone, so I asked how he liked it. Typically, people love it or they hate it. So far, I was leaning to the hate it because I couldn't get it to fit right - which means it's not going to work right. Daniel loved it and he explained that it took a little while before he did. You see, he had to bend the arm a little so that it would hold correctly on his ear. Ah-ha! That's what I was missing. A little tweak of the ear brace bar and everything is peachy. Now I can easily say it's the best darn headset I've ever used. Just make sure you give it a good try before you make your decission. The Jawbone has to fit correctly on your ear and the little white nib has to rest on your ...jawbone - hence the name. This helps the headset determine when you speak and when to mute/un-mute the microphone as well as when to invoke it's noise cancelling technology. Give the Jawbone some time, it's well worth it. :-) Oh, and thanks Daniel for the tip!

Next up was the Tablet PC Meetup put on by the guys from JKonTheRun. Another great event with lots of cool tablets to look at. I had a great talk with the HP rep about their hot new consumer line of Tablets as well as their existing enterprise line of Tablets. I really like the HP 2710p tablet - this thing is super thin and yet it's packed with features - including a business card scanner. This is on my short list to replace my, still pretty new, Fujitsu T4215 Tablet. :-) Read more...

USB memory keys (or Jump Drives as some like to call them) have quickly replaced CDs as the de facto standard for distribution of press materials . I did still receive a some CDs from 2 or 3 different companies, most exhibitors provided a USB memory key with their information on it. I managed to take home 8 different USB memory keys. I thought it would be fun to do a run down of who I got a key from and what size it was. :-)

Starting from the smallest and working up to the largest:

128 MB - Skype
256 MB - Corsair
512 MB - Life ware, Legget & Platt, Stardock
1 GB - Kingston
2 GB - Lenovo (x2)

Yes, there's one missing from this picture. My wife grabbed one of the 2GB models from Lenovo before I was able to snap this picture! ;-)