Week Four, I’m a Blackberry Whore

Once, I denied the need to go from Dial Up to Broadband so I could avoid having to handle pictures as well as words for my editors. It was pure lazy Luddite behaviour. (“Smash the presses!”) Yet I loved it when I finally went Fat Pipe and it opened a whole new world for me, like Talk Audio. But e-mail on the move? Pah! That said, I once flamed a poor PR lady who worked for a big venue, for which I feel ashamed now, as the desired response happened at 1.15 in the morning a few hours after I fired off my flamer. It was piffle really but involved knowing that the top end PR for a major venue (in fact the UK’s leading venue these days and deservedly so) had a Blackberry. I didn’t want to dangle on my e-mail everywhere, even if others did, though.
Hell, I’m not that crucial. I write about cars and electronics, fer gosh sake’s.
However, for the first time this year, the CES e-mail torrent became a white water rapid that roared into my inbox throughout the whole show. An awful lot of it was wider-interest stuff for me, like ZigBee low power RF remote control and monitoring technology and the explosion of Three-D TV that’s happening right now, along with ‘widget’ TV sets as computing and television converge. But it was abundantly clear that I was expected to be reading these pingees on the CES shuttle buses by the times they clustered in at – unless this was something to do with a lot of traffic from a few sources.
But if I’m really honest, it was the man from Acoustic Wood asking if I was in to be visited 20 minutes before he popped round – by e-mail, rather than the usually-rapid-but-delay-prone SMS system, fully expecting me, a technology writer to be properly equipped. So if my mate the chippy is, I figured I had to give in!
Anyway, it’s not a flash one and with a bit of luck I will be going to get a case for it from the Otterbox people I heard from before the CES so it aughta last. They make clever armour for smart phone-dropping idiots. (That’d be me.)
On the home front, you guys are due a new video and I have a review of a cute standalone screen to publish from C-KO as well as doing more work on the Clarion MAP 790. I have spoken about it before but it is such a mighty atom of a data cruncher, I kind of want to really know some detail and one thing I am yet to do, is drive to see if the New Wembley Stadium is in the 790’s 3D mapping icons. There’s news from the sound deadening scene to add to the new SilentCoat story and some new Pioneer toys to regale you with. All that and more stuff to test than you could imagine, as well as the Pioneer DEH-P8100BT headunit review to finish
I’ll go get on then….
Adam Rayner – Online Editor