Category: Gadgetry

The Consumerist is working up to a complete set of tips for purchasing phones and services from the major wireless carriers. The latest is “11 Confessions of a T-Mobile Sales Rep.” A sampler:

• Shop at the end of the month. T-mobile has a quota system for reps. They’ll be more generous at the end of the month. “Go in to purchase service during the last 5 days of the month. This is the time that is most crucial for store reps and their managers…

• Upgrade over the phone, not in a store. At T-Mobile, reps don’t get paid much for upgrades and don’t care if you get a deal on a phone. Upgrade over the phone to get the best deal…

Read the rest of the piece.

Previous post on Verizon and Cingular tips.

The Consumerist, a Gawker Media site I recently put on my radar and am liking more and more, has two pieces where former sales reps from Verizon and Cingular offers tips and pitfalls to avoid when buying hardware and services from these two wireless providers.

From the Verizon piece:
Verizon reps get tons of money from new lines and certain accessories and text packages, take advantage of this. They won’t let a new customer walk out the door. “Play hardball, they will do anything to get the new lines. VZW makes $ off the service, not the phones. Tell them you don’t want to mail in the rebate. There does come a point of diminishing returns. For example, if you walked in and wanted a $39 plan and a free Treo 700, not gonna happen. But I have given away almost every non-PDA phone in the store for the right deal. Also tell them you will buy the accessories, and text package. Trust me here, these are 2 of the biggest metrics for the reps. Return the accessories the next day and call customer care to cancel your text package.”
Read the rest.

From the Cingular piece:
Get the rebate in the store, and at home. “Try to get the rep to give you the rebate in the store, they’ll be likely to do this if you agree to get accessories. You can get go on-line and print out the rebate form from www.cingular.com and send it in anyway.”
Read the rest.

Awesome.

I’ve just posted a review of a cool new novelty watch by our favorite media prankster, Joey Skaggs. “It flashes, it moos, it poops…it also tells time.”

Joel Johnson is back at Gizmodo, and if you haven’t seen his first column, every Street Tech reader should check it out. It’s a sober call to arms to cut the crap and stop the endless parade of breathless gadget hooting and cat-calling found on most personal tech sites. It completely captures the sentiments that lead to the creation of Street Tech in 1997. We were tired of seeing this kind of rip n’ read tech journalism (read the press release, write a preview of how awesome and cool the gadget is going to be, and then never even bother to write an actual review. Or the review is written after a company-sponsored trip to the factory in some exotic local, or gifts arrive on your doorstep, or promises of ad buys. Bribery, in other words.).

Reading Joel’s piece, I don’t feel as thought Street Tech has been too guilty of breathlessness or corruption, but it saddens me that we haven’t been able to deliver more on our mission to suck less, to offer our honest and informed take on what passes our bullshit detector. I’m hoping that, with our Federated Media alliance, and with some other changes coming to ST this year, we can deliver on at least a little more of that promise. We’ll certainly do our best. And a million thanks to Joel for shaking the chrome plating off of the industry-allied chrome-plated turd that passes for much of personal tech journalism. Let’s hope it makes a difference.

I’m pretty much at the level of the caffeine drip at this point in my addiction (hey, everybody gets at least one). Given that, I frequently have my insulated travel mug with me on the go (I choose between two: my Amazon mug and a lovely Celexa one, in soothing hospital blue — somehow my travel mugs speak volumes). But with these insulated containers, designed to retain heat as long as possible, it’s inevitable that I burn the ever-lovin’ crap out of my tongue or the roof of my mouth.

So I was psyched to see these Brugo mugs (US$20). They have two chambers, the bottom one, which keeps your java hell-fire hot, and a “temperature-control chamber,” which cools off the coffee to a sipable temp before you drink it. My only question is: how finicky it is to operate, i.e. how fast can I get the coffee in me? Which brings me back to the drip. Maybe it’s time someone actually looked into the caffeine IV. Hey, when ThinkGeek is selling caffeine soap and infused water, is an IV really that out there?

Increasingly, we’re starting to see big players in the computer display biz moving heavily into TVs, as the two techs converge. Here at Street Tech, we’ve been impressed with some of Viewsonic’s recent computer displays. I recently reviewed the ViewSonic VX1935wm 19″ LCD Monitor for our holiday gift guide. I liked the darn thing so much, when the review period was over, I bought it! Now with my 27″ CRT TV dying a slow and ungraceful death, I’ve been looking at *reasonably priced* HDTV displays.

I4U just did a review of the new Viewsonic N4251w 42″ LCD TV display and were very impressed with it (giving it 9.5 out 10). At a street priced of around US$1,500, it’s out of my price-range (I’m looking for something below that grand sweet spot), but if you’re in the market for an HD display in this size and price range, I’d seriously give Viewsonic’s line the ol’ once-over.

Gadget pr0n that is… as in the unboxing of the new Apple Airport Extreme Base Station, now with visible “n“s. Really purdy. Apple knows from object value. Mmmmm. Hulk want.

You’ve likely seen those gadgets that monitor your position behind the wheel of a car and squawk if you start to nod out. Well, this one does the same sort of thing when you’re behind the wheel of your big 20″, A.K.A. your computer monitor, and you’ve squirmed and wormed yourself into a posture that only a circus contortionist could love. It’s like a USB version of a nagging mother telling you to sit up straight. (Rolling pin to the back of the head sold separately.)

I’m intrigued by the flip-screen phones that seem to be all the rage in Asia, and are coming to the States now. Here’s a link to a demo of the LG VX9400, showing off Verizon’s forthcoming live streaming service for broadcast TV. Broadcast TV? What’s that?

There is a new open-source program for TiVo owners that emulates a TiVo GoBack server called TiVo.Net (wiki available here). It can open many video formats, converts them on the fly and streams mpeg2 to your TiVo. It uses ffmpeg to convert the video so it should be able to stream pretty much any video that ffmpeg can open. It’s written in C# so it should be portable to Linux and Mac using mono.

I’m personally excited to use this in conjunction with Democracy Player to provide extra programming on my TiVo like the Make: podcast and also downloading stuff like James Burke’s Connections to watch them again from the comfort of my couch.
via TiVo Lovers