What are you putting on your Network for the holidays?
Before Oprah Winfrey became the poster child for Amazon’s Kindle, there was just one voice we trusted to tell us which gadgets to buy: The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg.
Fortunately, Oprah’s newfound love of gadgets hasn’t put Walt out of business and he and some tech-loving friends came to Silicon Valley last night to take us on an entertaining romp through the gadgets every self-respecting valley executive will be snapping up this holiday season.
Naturally, we at Cisco (Cisco sponsors the Churchill Club) were looking out for fabulous networked stuff and we weren’t disappointed. Here’s our short list of favorite networked gadgets you just won’t be able to live without this holiday season!
6. Can’t get enough network access? Then in-car Wi-Fi is here for you! Apparently, Chrysler is about to start offering the service in new vehicles!
5. Love that place in the suburbs, but hate the cell phone reception? No problem…build your own cell tower! It’ll only cost you about $99.00 for the privilege of helping all your neighbors get a signal too! Check out the Airave Femtocell from Sprint.
4. Is getting directions from a GPS device not quite enough for you? How about this new gadget from Garmin. Apparently, it tells you when you’re breaking the speed limit too!
3. The network’s all around you. You can work from anywhere, effortlessly. Great, isn’t it? Well yes, until three of you need to gather around a mobile phone to do a conference call from client’s conference room. Well, how about a mobile speaker phone to get you wired for sound.
2. Got your boarding pass online, but forgot to print it off before you got to the gate? No problem! Open up the Web page on your phone and print to your Pentax pocket printer. Now that’s mobility!
1. Animatronic, singing, lip-curling latex Elvis. Okay, so he’s not networked, but come on! A singing, robot Elvis! What more do you want?
If your gadget appetite hasn’t quite been fulfilled by Elvis and our short-list, you can get a bigger fix of last night’s stuff from Kara Swisher at the All Things Digital blog
Posted by David McCulloch at 10:17PM PST
michealyork1 Nov 29, 2008
I experienced a similar problem. When I bought my iPhone, I first checked with "Got Reception?" (Gotreception.com) It’s a great resource for finding out where reception problems are most likely to occur BEFORE you lock yourself with a specific carrier.