Holidays in June: Parade Edition
Everyone loves a parade, right? Right? Well, a Holiday Gift Parade is sort of like a regular parade, only instead of baton-twirling tweens and piles of elephant dung, there’s a bunch of tech companies standing in a room, trying to get you to look at their products and accept their business cards, which for my money is much better use of company time than standing on a street corner, waving back at men in top hats and sashes.
Gearlog took another hike up to Times Square, to check out the latest holiday offerings. This is getting to be a nasty habit. Check out what we found, after the jump.
dotMobi: Carol M’s question of the day was, “so, why are you at the Holiday Gift Parade?” Nowhere was the question more appropriate than at the dotMobi booth. After all, the focus of a show with the words “Gift Parade” in the title is generally stocking fodder, and let’s be brutally honest here, a dotMobi site, while certainly good for viewing via the browser on a standard Internet-capable phone, wouldn’t look like much adorned with a bow, sitting beneath the tree. We didn’t get much of an answer, but the representive made sure to send us off with some illuminated promotional pens, which is almost as good, right?
JBL: JBL was showing off a cool, vaguely techy-looking bike, which, I’m sorry to report was not a cool combination iPod dock/10-speed, but was rather part of a display for the company’s new selection of Spyro speaker systems, which are cool in their own right, but still, a mountain bike-speaker dock they are not. The bulk of the spread showcased by JBL had already been rolled out at CES. I was particularly taken by the Reference 610 series. Awful name, sure, but these headphones are one of the most comfortable and best sounding Bluetooth models I’ve put on my head. The Reference comes with an iPod specific Bluetooth adapter, and fits comfortably over the ears like a pair of Bose’s QuietComfort.
Meebo: Another questionable entry for a Holiday Gift Parade, but the Meebo team is the only booth that gave me a group hug. The site of the week that I gave the instant messaging aggregator is finally starting to pay off. Sweeet.
Ultreo: The woman at the booth gave me the rundown on this electric toothbrush, which apparently uses ultrasound to clean your teeth. I wittily shot back, “ultrasound? You mean like with the babies?” She kind of smiled and nodded. Almost certainly the high point of my journalistic career, thus far. The ultrasound uses microscopic bubbles to clean the crevices of your teeth that the bristles can’t reach. Got a review unit–as I was carrying it on the streets of Manhattan, a man stopped me on the street to inquire about it. “I′m a teeth man, too,” he informed me. Now it was my turn to smile and nod. And slowly back away.
Original post by Brian Heater