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Today marks the end of CTIA Wireless 2007. We’ve seen a lot of phones and gadgets over the past week, but what were your favorites, and which vendor were you impressed with the most?
For me, my favorite product is a tie. I can’t choose between the Helio Ocean and the HTC Shift. They’re both awesome in their respective categories, so it must remain a tie for me. I will say that the Sound Leaf Bone Conduction Receiver Microphone has to be the winner for strangest new product. It’s really cool, but still very strange.
As for my pick of favorite vendor, I wasn’t there to meet and greet them all, so I can’t go off of their personality. So I’m basing it off of who brought the most, and best stuff to the table. Pantech is the winner in my book. First, they’re the ones that created the Helio Ocean, and that alone is just awesome. Then they bring out all of their concept phones for all to see, very nice. Runner-up for favorite vendor goes to HTC. The Shift and Advantage are just sweet, and then they bring out the very solid Vox and S720.
The award for “best way to cover up a really big mistake” goes to the guys over at UTStarcom. If you hadn’t heard, they accidentally displayed a banner that depicted the Sidekick ID, which was not to be shown. So how does one fix a problem like this? With spray paint of course. Check out the pictures here.
That does it for my favorites. What were your “favorites” from this year’s show?
This is the first year in many at CTIA that I was bored with everything I saw. Most of the newer handsets were going with a metallic or half-metallic looks. I applaud moving technology into a fashion-concious direction, it seemed to me like a me-too year all the way around. Even NTT DoCoMo’s concepts were nothing to spark the imagination of the future of wireless.
This was going to be my impression of 2007 wireless in general until I was lucky enough to catch a all-too brief glimpse of the Helio Ocean. Like mentioned above, in the brief time I saw it, I was impressed. The form factor is not all that novel and I am suspect to believe HTC and others have toyed with a dual slider with two-seperate keypads, but have thrown it out the window due to the size it adds. Helio took the chance, and did what they could to slim out the phone, oh I mean device.
Aside from the form-factor the messaging client, or messaging dashboard as they referred to it was the clincher. Helio was able to create an easy to use interface that allowed you access to all messaging, without becoming cumbersome.
I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Especially with the rumored Activesynch ability, it will become my work and play device.