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Wireless trade show offers practical technology
Products designed to solve every-day problems like how to clean the small screen on mobile phones were also featured at the CTIA wireless 2005 trade show in New Orleans.By BRUCE MEYERSON
The Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS, March 18 -- Not every mobile phone innovation involves streaming video and 3-D games. Some don't even involve the phone, as evidenced by some of the inventions on display off the beaten path at this week's CTIA Wireless 2005 trade show.
Dan Carp, chief executive officer of Eastman Kodak company, holds two new featured products at the CTIA Wireless 2005 trade show. Carp was also the keynote speaker.
(AP Photo/Judi Bottoni)
Some solve problems you didn't even know you had.
Take the T-String, an elastic holster for your forearm to hold a phone or an MP3 music player.
There's also the PocketSurfer, a Web-browsing device that rejects the prevailing wisdom that people want a single gadget that does it all, even if that means watching everything on the tiny screen of a mobile phone. And then there's the Cell-Klear to remove those pesky smudges from the lens of your phone's midget camera lens.
The main idea behind the T-String is that mobile devices aren't very accessible on a belt or in a bag. But it's also unclear how comfortable it is to have such a bulky device protruding from your wrist for hours at a time, the elastic band pressing into your veins. The strap also was a bit too snug for larger phones, making it hard to place such handsets back in the holster after hanging up from a call.
Then again, judging from the 25 flashy designs and the bare-chested boy surrounded by girls on the New York-based company's Web site, T-String may be more focused on style than utility.
Prices range from $10 for a basic look to $18 for rhinestones, fur or "metal dog tag."
The $200 PocketSurfer, made by DataWind Inc. of Montreal, is intended as a two-device solution for easier and faster viewing of Web pages, plus simpler typing on a full keyboard rather than a numeric keypad.
A user pays $10 a per month for faster downloads from DataWind's Internet server, which compresses and accelerates the data transmitted from Web pages being visited over a mobile network.
A mobile phone is still required to provide a link to the Internet, so the user needs to pay for data service from an access provider, though DataWind says its speed makes it unnecessary to sign up for a higher-end plan.
The information is passed from phone to PocketSurfer using a short-range Bluetooth wireless beam. The company sells $30 Bluetooth adapters for more than 130 phones without that technology.
At six inches wide, the clamshell device is wide enough to display full HTML, XML and Java online content, rather than squeezing or reformatting Web pages as many cellular-based services do.
For the stubborn masses who insist on a single device that does it all, some software makers are trying to build a better browser for the mobile phone. They include Bitstream Inc., a legendary name that developed text fonts and related technologies during the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980's.
Bitstream, based in Cambridge, Mass., has used its expertise with graphics to develop the ThunderHawk browser for mobile phones running on the Windows Mobile operating system from Microsoft Corp.
The browser also relies on data compression so it can deliver full-blown HTML pages rather than repurposed content. ThunderHawk requires a subscription of either $50 a year or $6 a month.
While a growing number of mobile phones ship with digital cameras built in, the image quality has always been too poor to print out most shots. So most users just view the shots on their phones, or maybe e-mail them to a friend, venues that don't give rise to finicky photographic worries like a dirty lens.
But just because handset makers are boosting the resolution of phone-embedded cameras, making good-quality prints a possibility, that doesn't mean it's also easy to keep your grimey paws off the lens when talking on the phone.
To the rescue comes another Canadian company, International Parkside Products Inc., with a $6 solution.
The Cell-Klear is a 3.5-inch pen-shaped device whose tip contains a patented carbon compound that cleans the camera lens. The pen comes with a cap and a loop to attach to a key chain.
Story Produced by: Medha Raval
