Thursday: Phones

Today was my turn to go to the show, while hubby babysat the girl.

So far this is turning out to be a pretty interesting year at the show. It took us over an hour to get to the show on the bus today because of a sulfuric acid spill on the strip. I decided to start in Central rather than South and I didn't even finish that today. Saw Motorola, Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung, and a few others and did not even get to Sony. Samsung's booth is scaled way, way down from last year's LCD "shrine." Panasonic is twice as big as last year, occupying space downstairs of the mezzanine now. Also this year I saw charging stations near the hot dog stands where folks could plug in their phones.


The "Old Guard" of Microsoft and Intel still guard the gates of Central. Huge throngs of people as usual. But I don't buy anything these guys make anymore, so I pushed thru to get to the booths mentioned above.

- Phones
The Motorola Atrix, with its 1950mAh battery, is still the champ in my mind, primarily for battery ife. 9hr talk time, 14 days standby. The Samsung Infuse is nice and all with its AMOLED screen, but can a 4.5" display trump a huge but slim battery? The AMOLED really looks nice tho, the android icons look like smooth molded plastic rather than pixels. Don't know if I would use the Webtop accessory (full keyboard, large screen, with hidden dock in back to dock the phone).

This does a few things. It provides a full sized keyboard. It provides full access to the apps on your phone (shows the screen output and lets you use the user interface, but the apps are running on your phone.). It also provides a full browser. It charges your phone. At first glance it seems like "your phone is powering your laptop" (or netbook) but with Android not with Windows. So you wont be running outlook or other productivity apps, altho there are several Word, Excel, and Powerpoint viewers for Android I believe. A physical keyboard is something I'd like to have at all times, not just when I'm sitting at a desk. Then again, tonight I wanted to type this huge post in on a laptop rather than on my blackberry.
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