Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t tell me. You wanted a Mi-Fi personal wireless hotspot, and all your boss bought you was that lousy 3G USB dongle. Well, quit fretting: with just one more ugly chunk of plastic in your stuffed and dorky nylon laptop bag, you can have what you want.

The Wi-Reach 3G Personal Hotspot doesn’t even require that you pull the SIM card from your existing USB modem. The plastic box, which resembles a battery charger, has a USB port inside into which you slot your stick. From there, it takes the EVDO or HSPA modem’s connection and turns it into an 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi hotspot, powered by a lithium-ion battery for up to five hours (or powered via its mini-USB port). It’ll even work with 4G dongles when they start to show up.

Its a neat solution, marred by one detail: at $100, it costs the same as a Mi-Fi, meaning you could clear some space in your ugly bag by sucking it up and buying one of those instead.

Wi-Reach 3G Personal Hotspot [Connect One]

There are many kinds of schwag to be had a trade-shows, and high-tech trade-shows like CES and the Mobile World Congress offer equally high-tech junk. Years ago, the branded give-away of choice was the ballpoint pen. Then, when people stopped writing things down, the PR people would try to buy you off with a useless CD.

Then a strange thing happened. USB sticks started to replace CDs as the method to pass on press info, but they were still expensive. Many of the PR people acted like they were giving you a precious 128MB gift, and that you should be grateful, dammit!

This last year has been different again. Presumably the prices have dropped below that of the CD, because I wasn’t given a single optical disc this year. Instead, the PR people were almost desperate to dish out the USB sticks. It goes something like this:

Me: “Hi. I’m Charlie from…”
PR person (hysterically): “Have you got a PEN DRIVE!?”

Above you see the selection from just the first day of the show, spent and tired after delivering their payload of specs and product shots into my soft, welcoming MacBook. How did they do? Clockwise, from the one that is plugged in.

SanDisk Cruzer, 2GB

This should be the best, as it comes from the daddy of flash memory, SanDisk. It opens like a switchblade, the USB plug popping out to enter the port. The sliding switch doubles as an orange lamp that flashes on activity and otherwise glows sleepily like a Mac’s sleep light. The added bonus comes in the form of its recursive contents, which is the product details of other SanDisk flash drives.

Result: A solid standard

Opera, 2GB

Next is Opera’s offering. The browser company chose a case that mimics the color and logo of its product. The metallic red finish is rubbery to the touch, and inside is a smokey-brown plastic body. The keychain-ring is flimsy, though, and the removable cap easy to lose.

Result: On message.

Pepcom, 2GB

Pepcom is a company that organizes get togethers at CES and MWC. High-profile vendors pitch their wares from tables and invited guests (mostly journalists) get free booze and canapes. For such a well organized and stylish event, this rather pedestrian Kingston pen-drive is a disappointment. It contains contact details of everyone showing at the event, but doesn’t even have Pepcom written on the outside.

Result: Nothing to see here. Move along. And pass me another sausage roll.

Powermat, 2GB

2GB is proving to be the new 1GB — plenty of room for the PDF boarding passes you take once a year to be printed at Kinko’s. Powermat’s 2GB drive conforms, but is non-impressive in any other way. Actually, that’s not quite true. The Powermat pen wins my award for the ugliest stick of the show. The company might make some rather popular wireless charging mats, but whoever chose the USB stick supplier was having a bad day.

Result: Fugly, with metallic trim.

Sony Ericsson, 1GB

This little number was pushed eagerly into my hand by the Sony Ericsson press person, and no wonder: At just 1GB it must have cost just pennies. It is also hard to operate as the hinged, two-part case initially appears to be a slider like the SanDisk. Worse, it has a couple of files on there named MEMSTICK.IND and MSTK_PRO.IND, which cannot be moved to the trash.

However, it wins points back by having a cute green glowing light which matches the equally nice 3D logo, just like you find on SE phones. It also has a removable Memory Stick Micro inside, which would be neat if you own any Sony products.

Result: Stylish and yet hard to use and packed with proprietary technology. More Sony than Ericsson.

Marvell, 2.11GB

Who knows where the extra 0.11GB comes from? This little stick is, apart from the color, the double of the Pepcom pen, although at least Marvell bothered to brand it. It is cheap and ugly in every way, but it does the job it’s meant to do, just like Marvell’s cellphone processors. Dull but functional.

Result: Over-clocked?

SanDisk microSD Card and Reader, 16GB

Yes, 16GB! This monster is not technically schwag or even “press materials”. Instead it is a “review unit” in that it is the product whose details are contained on the other SanDisk drive above. The tiny card reader comes equipped with an even tinier microSD card, which could be put in a phone to store music and photos. To me, this would be completely useless, but hey, it’s so small I’ll probably lose it before I get a chance to test it out. Wait? Where is it?

Result: Already lost.

BARCELONA — Did you know that your eyes are electric? NTT Docomo does, and has harnessed their potential (ahem) to control your MP3 player.

The Eye-Controlled Earphones, on show at the Mobile World Congress, have electrodes around the outside of the ‘buds. These electrodes, called “electroculograms” (EOG), detect tiny difference in the electrical potential of the eyes as they move. The eye is positive at the cornea and negative at the retina. As the eyes move, the potential around it changes, and these changes can be used to control things.

Now, you don’t want to skip tracks every time you look to the right, so there is a code involved, much like those used to play the classic Virtua Fighter, with its double-tap joypad commands. Here at the show, we were treated to a demo. To play/pause the track, you look left then right. To skip, look either left or right twice in succession, returning to the center each time. And for volume, you rotate your gaze clockwise or counter-clockwise.

As you can see in the picture, the poor demo guy ended up looking like a white-eyed zombie most of the time. The hit rate was good, though, and an on-screen graph showed the detection as it happened. And as the tech works with eyes open or closed, it could certainly be useful. You can even answer the phone, so next time your boss calls you on a Sunday and you roll your eyes, it’ll be totally legit.

Doxie is a cheap, simple and easy-to-use document scanner that launched this week at the Macworld Expo. The slim, portable scanner uses USB bus-power to turn paper into PDFs, jpegs or lossless png files, and – here’s the twist – it then sends them directly off to the cloud.

The specs: scans can be done at up to 600dpi in 24bit color, and as fast as 12 seconds per page (if you turn off color and lower the resolution). That’s about it. Doxie shifts all the heavy lifting off to either your computer or the cloud, which is the reason for the small package and the lowish price.

In fact, the internet is the real point here. If you use Doxie’s cloud service, you can store pictures and documents and have their URLs shared or Tweeted automatically for you. Better is integration with existing services like Flickr and Picasa for photos, or Evernote and Google Docs for text (and subsequent OCR scanning).

If you don’t like sharing everything, the companion software will crop and straighten your photos and add them direct to Lightroom or iPhoto, and let you choose what to do with documents, too. In short, if you deal with a lot of paper, this could be a cheap and simple solution. Available late March.

Doxie scanner [Get Doxie]

At first glance, Urbanears Plattan headphones appear to me just another me-too copy of Panasonic’s super-successful RP-HTX7 retro-cans. They have the requisite big, padded ear-cups, thick headband and garish colors, and even come in at a similar $60.

Look closer, though, and you see some extras that put them way ahead. The stylish headphones have a microphone and inline remote that will control or at least let you talk to most phones, including the iPhone. They also have something I’ve never seen before: a headphone jack socket high up on one earpiece, so you can let a friend jack-in and share your tunes, or listen as you watch a movie together. They also fold flat (ish) so, unlike the Panasonics, they’re actually good to travel with.

The only thing we can’t tell without a test is how they sound, but the numbers are promising. The 40mm driver has a frequency response of 20Hz-20KHz and a sensitivity of 112dB. On sale now.

Plattan [Urbanears. Thanks, Valerie!]