Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung’s press kit at CTIA today had a little surprise in it: several photos of the Finesse, a new high-end, touch-screen phone for MetroPCS.

The Finesse is functionally similar to the Samsung Delve for Alltel and the Instinct for Sprint. Like the Delve, it has Samsung’s widget-based TouchWiz interface, though it isn’t a smart phone. The phone has a 3″, 240×400 touch screen and a 2-megapixel camera. It’s capable of running on 3G networks, though MetroPCS’s 3G rollout is spotty so far.

The Finesse is the first MetroPCS phone with a full Web browser, and it also comes with a GPS driving-directions application, mobile IM, an email program, and music and video players. The phone costs $349 from MetroPCS – that seems expensive, but Metro doesn’t require a contract, so they don’t subsidize phones the way the big carriers do.

This isn’t exactly the sort of announcement one expects to come out of the CTIA conference. Among all the usual mobile-phone emails that landed in our mailbox this week was one that read “CTIA–The Wireless Association Announces the Death of Mark Desautels.”

The 56-year-old VP of the wireless association died of an apparent heart attack while attending the show on Monday afternoon in Las Vegas. Desautels had been with the CTIA since 1998, after serving as the president and CEO of the Wireless Data Forum and the assistant to the director at the Office of Intergovernmental Relations, Congressional Budget Office.

It’s sad and strange news, and no doubt a shock to most. Stranger still, however, is the wording on the release sent out to “announce” his death. I suppose it’s for the best that they didn’t save the announcement till tomorrow.

Cricket Wireless and Motorola today announced the low-cost
carrier’s highest-end phone so far, the Motorola Evoke QA4. The QA4 will be
Cricket’s first touch-screen phone.

The Evoke is a somewhat oval-shaped slider phone (4.25″ x 2″
x .7″, 4.5 oz) with a 2.8″, 240×400 LCD touch screen. The screen slides up to
show a ridged phone number pad.

Motorola has loaded quite a bit of software on here for a
non-smart-phone – as always, it will be interesting to see what the carriers
leave intact. The Evoke has a full HTML browser, a special MySpace app,
threaded SMS and email applications, video streaming from sites like YouTube,
and GPS. Motorola promises “quick-start widgets” on the home screen to let you
jump to social networking and photo-sharing sites.

The Evoke has an accelerometer, and if you turn it on its
side, it pops up a virtual QWERTY keypad for texting and e-mailing.

I can take apart the remote control and I can almost put it back together. Oh, and I can also bring you the day’s best tech deals.

1. Say it with me: “Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler…” Now we can all have Milton’s stapler. Amazon is offering a super deal on a red Swingline (keep it, because it doesn’t bind up as much). Grab one for only $14.55 and don’t let anybody take it, ever. “If they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…” Easy, Milton.

2. A penny doesn’t even buy you a real blackberry, let alone the phone named after the fruit–except that it does right now on Amazon. Get a BlackBerry Curve 8310 with a new service plan from AT&T for $.01.

3. How about getting a robot to vacuum your house? Rosie from The Jetsons isn’t available, so pick up this iRobot Roomba instead. Buy.com is offering the Roomba 530 for the fantastic price of $159.99 (a 60 percent savings), and that includes free shipping.