Hasta La Gadget!

There are too damn many ebook readers and it’s tough to figure out what’s worth buying and which reader will even survive the market. To make things easy, here’s our guide to the readers that matter—for now. Updated.

Of course we’re skipping some of the many ebook readers floating around, but quite frankly we can’t really stomach all of them. We decided to focus on the ones that matter to us—whether because they stand a shot of surviving the over-saturated market, or simply because they are examples of what we think matters about these gadgets. Feel free to let us know if you disagree with any of our survival odds or if you think we missed a significant device.

Barnes & Noble Nook

When we reviewed the Barnes & Noble Nook, we decided that it was pretty damn good all around. At the time, we mainly focused on pitting it against the Amazon Kindle, but even without that limited comparison the Nook remains a rather good device:

It’s got a second screen which actually serves a useful purpose


Expansion and evolution possibilities of this very device are great, especially with touchscreen and Android OS


Lending and in-store Barnes & Noble action will be huge


Native ePub support


A little thicker than Kindle, but as a tradeoff, it’s a little smaller footprint


Wi-Fi doesn’t seem to matter now—hopefully it will prove to be an advantage later


LCD and other features mean less battery life than Kindle, but still adequate, “measured in days”


Current software is buggy and sluggish in spots; hopefully fixes and optimization will come soon


Second-screen possibilities are great, but current implementation is cautious and conservative

Taking all those features and shortcomings into account, we think that the Nook’s survival chance is 80%— if it can fix its firmware and get production up to speed.

Entourage Edge

A hands on of the Entourage Edge left us hesitant about whether there’s actually a market for something that has the price tag of a good netbook and barely more features than most readers:

It does have two full screens on which actual work can be done


Can run Android applications and be used to browse the web


Wi-Fi built-in, so you’re not stuck relying on 3G


Two built-in microphones for noise-cancelation, but unfortunately no synchronization with notes


Note taking can be done using a stylus


Switching between the screens allows for websites to be loaded on one screen and “pushed” to the other


Just as with most other readers, you can highlight, annotate, and bookmark


It’s three whole freakin’ pounds and ridiculously bulky


$500 price tag.

The Edge shows us what happens when you try to make a reader into what it’s not—a pseudo netbook or tablet. We think the device’s survival chance is 0% and consider it pretty much DOA.

Plastic Logic Que

We liked the feel of the Plastic Logic Que when we got our hands on it, but we didn’t like the price tag. The device is mainly aimed at business folk who want to carry a notepad-sized device instead of a stack of documents, but it could make a rather nice reader if you crave for a large screen:

At 8.5 x 11 x .33 inches, its about the size and thickness of a standard notepad. It weighs about one pound. Like a heavy notepad.


The screen is huge—and I mean huge. Over ten inches.


Because of Plastic Logic’s obsession with its namesake material, the Que is light as a feather


Formatting from magazines and other publications is maintained on the screen


The interface seems snappy and intuitive


Que Mail and Que Calendar services allow email and calendar updates to be pushed over WiFi and 3G networks


While odd to look at, the wide bezel actually makes the Que a lot more comfortable to hold than some other readers


The back of the device is a magnet for fingerprints. It’s annoying, but not unusual for shiny toys like this.


$650 for the 4GB model with Wi-FI and $800 for the 8GB model with WiFi and 3G are quite the prices to swallow

We think the Que’s features, design, and business as well as consumer appeal leave it with a survival chance of 70%—higher if businesses feel like spending so much on a device that will certainly help cut back on paper use. Or if Plastic Logic manages to cut back on that price.

Spring Design Alex Reader

Our hands on of the Spring Design Alex Reader left us thinking that the Nook might have some serious competition, but even on its own the Alex is a rather good device:

It’s thin—we thought we’d break it just by holding it—but it turned out to be surprisingly sturdy


You can run any Android app including the browser, email client, and music player apps


The interaction between the two screens doesn’t seem fully worked out


No news about whether there’s a data provider secured for the device


$399 makes the Alex a wee bit pricier than the nook

Assuming that a data provider is secured for the Alex, we could see its survival chance being 80%—higher if there’s a price drop to bring it closer to the Nook’s.

Sony Daily

When the Sony Daily Edition reader was announced, we got a bit excited about its electronic library program and wide screen, but alas, we’re still waiting to actually get one of these devices into our hands to check out all the features:

Sony’s got plenty of partners for this device to provide content


The on-screen content is rotated automatically to allow viewing in a nice, comfortable, and super wide landscape format


Native EPUB support


The electronic library program will let you borrow books from your local library’s electronic collection


Free 3G service is included—but limited to accessing the Sony Store


$399 is a bit much for a device with so few tricks up its sleeve

Until we actually take a Daily for a test run, we’re deeming its survival chance as 40%—mostly because the library program is appealing along with the push for EPUB formatting.

Kindle

In our review of the Amazon Kindle 2, we discovered that it’s not too different from the original model, but we still liked all the features:

The rounded design makes the device appealing to hold and look at


Zippy interface, decent refresh rate


Plenty of internal storage and long battery life


Text-to-speech book reading


Crisp, sharp display


It’s hard to read longer, more complex books

While the Kindle 2 wasn’t a huge leap from the first generation, we still think the device about a 80% chance of survival, especially if Amazon works on improving the interface and how the device treats flipping through book sections.

Notion Ink Adam Pixel Qi

When we got our hands on the Notion Ink Adam Pixel Qi, we discovered that it’s more of a tablet than it is a reader and that it tries too hard to be both:

The device runs on Android 2.0


There’s a snappy Nvidia Tegra 2 processor lurking inside


10.1-inch panel that can switch between backlit LCD mode and low-power electrophoretic reflective mode


3G service, which is becoming fairly standard among readers


LCD colors aren’t as vivid as a plain LCD

Despite having “ink” in its name, the Adam falls too far into tablet territory for us to take it seriously as a reader so we give it a 40% chance of survival in that particular market. As a tablet device though, it might actually do rather well.

Skiff Reader

When we got a hands on with the Skiff, we were pretty impressed by its size but uncertain about most features since we didn’t get to play with a final production model:

It’s big and thin: 11.5 inches of touchscreen space on a device only a quarter of an inch thick


Light and—quite importantly—solid feeling


Layout mimicks a real newspaper better than most readers


Can handle 12fps animation, which is pretty primitive compared to an LCD device


Reasoably responsive to taps and swipes


You can highlight and annotate content


Magazines feel awkward to read as they’re full page scans and any zooming feels slow due to the e-ink refresh rate

Once again: The Skiff unit we tried out was not a final version, so plenty can change by the time it hits shelves. But based on what we’ve seen so far, this could be a pretty great reader overall—despite its key focus being periodicals. Assuming that it’s price turns out to be reasonable and the interface is fixed up a bit more, we give it a survival chance of 70%.

Any Others?

Those are the ebook readers we think deserve some discussion right now. There are plenty we left out—super cheap ones, poor imitations of readers mentioned already, and some that just plain make us gag. We didn’t want to promote crappy products or those where “you get what you pay for” rings a bit too true. That disclaimer aside, we welcome discussion and mentions of other readers, simply because it’s always possible that we omitted something worthwhile—like the Skiff which has now been added—by accident. So let’s hear it in the comments.

My love for Blu-ray players grows whenever companies add another feature that has nothing to do with Blu-ray. Now any worthwhile player is a home-entertainment hub, replacing cable box and Apple TV alike. How soon till they handle everything?

We looked at the four newly announced flagship players from the four biggest Blu-ray companies, LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony. Any self-respecting Blu-ray player today has Pandora and Picasa, and of course Netflix subscription streaming video. They also have some form of pay-per-view movie download service, from Vudu, Amazon or Roxio’s CinemaNow and Blockbuster apps.

This year, though, the companies turned up the juice. LG added a built-in hard drive; Sony surprisingly built a remote-control iPhone app. And now all top Blu-ray players will go 3D. Integrated Wi-Fi was a stand-out feature last year; this year it’s par.

These won’t be out till the summer, and there’s no pricing announced yet, but already we’re excited. See, putting everything but the the kitchen sink into a firmware upgradeable $200-to-$300 box is way smarter than jamming it all inside a $1500 TV, where picture quality should be the chief concern.

What Do Blu-ray Players Still Need? Video File Support

If you want to know who will soon be putting HD media players out of business, look no further than these connected Blu-ray players. Samsung and LG won’t let smaller companies steal their spot on the TV stand; my guess is that they will have amazing file compatibility at launch or slightly after. I mean, LG put in a hard drive, for God’s sake. If that isn’t for dumping crazy video files, I don’t know what is.

The hard drive sounds nice, but it’s not even necessary. With Wi-Fi connectivity and DLNA compatibility, these players should technically be able to play all your home videos, wherever they are. But they absolutely need 1080p DivX, H.264 and AVC (TS) compatibility—and the ability to read DVD disc images—in order to be considered viable HD video players.

I don’t list reported file compatibilities here because I have learned that spec sheets can easily lie when it comes to supported video, especially when the combination of codec, wrapper, resolution and file size all affect readability. Until the players are shipping, their true file support is a mystery. Still, I have hope for these.

The $100 Roku is already on the ropes thanks to current Blu-ray players, since they give you what Roku does plus disc playback. The $120 Roku HD-XR hasn’t yet taken advantage of its USB jack, and the company didn’t announce anything at CES. If they wait too long before providing wide HD video file compatibility, that product, too, will be hurting.

If the makers of Blu-ray players get with the program, and address the need for true universal home-video playback, they will easily shove aside Asus O!Play and everything else too.

OK, not everything else. Game consoles, already bestsellers, have been actively converting non-gamers by adding streaming video services, and developing natural interfaces like the Wii’s popular motion controls and the more ambitious forthcoming Xbox 360 Natal project.

Hopefully this will be the year they see the light on video support, too. The PS3 could have been the ultimate set-top box, but Sony’s inability to see the commercial value of openness killed the PS3’s non-gamer appeal. The Xbox is a lot closer to the ideal, but it doesn’t yet support all files, and betting on HD DVD—and then not jumping to Blu despite Ballmer’s frequent (and justifiable) promises—means no HD disc support, also a mistake.

Look, some of these Blu-ray players won’t go all the way with file support, either. Speaking of Sony, can you imagine the king of patent royalties and DRM embrace file formats it doesn’t get cash payoffs from, or could possibly be used in the service of piracy? Still, at least one great Blu-ray player will rise here. Am I dreaming? A year ago I would have thought so, but from what we all now regularly get from our cheap HD media players, my dreams are likely to come true—and soon, too.

Speculation about the Apple Tablet mostly focuses on what the device is, not how it functions. Text input, more than anything else, is the problem Apple needs to solve to make the concept work. So how will they do it?

CES was rotten with new tablets, some Android, some not, some with fascinating screens, and again, some not. But one thing they all had in common was that they hadn’t quite figured out the text input problem: How do you create text without a keyboard?

The Problem

We’ve been comfortably typing without physical keyboards for years now, and this is largely Apple’s doing. One of the great triumphs of the iPhone was to make onscreen keyboards bearable—something that, even if you hate the concept of virtual keys on principle, you have to admit they accomplished. This works:

Extending this to the tablet, though, would be a mistake. I had a chance to play with a few different sizes of tablets at CES, nearly all of which had traditional onscreen keyboards—in particular, the Android 2.0 keyboard, which is aesthetically different but functionally almost identical to iPhone OSes. None of them worked, at least in the way that I wanted them to, for one reason: they were too big. Seven-inch tablets were too large to comfortably thumb-type on, while 10-inch tablets made text input all but impossible. The onscreen keyboard as we know it doesn’t scale gracefully, and unless Apple wants their tablet to be completely useless (our sources say they don’t) they’re going to have to figure this out. So what are Apple’s options?

Solution 1: A Giant iPhone

Apple has made mistakes before, but to only have a simple onscreen keyboard would qualify as an outright screw-up. QWERTY-style, thumb-actuated onscreen keyboards work on screens up to about five inches, with the 4.3-inch-screened HTC Touch HD2‘s keyboard straining even the most unsettlingly long thumbs. But to assume that this won’t work is to assume that the tablet is to be held a certain way, with hands at four and eight o-clock, more or less like a touchscreen phone in landscape mode. This may not be the case.

What if the tablet is meant to be held with one hand, and controlled with the other? What if it has some kind of kickstand or mount, so you can actually type with both hands, a la a regular keyboard? What if it’s intended to only work in portrait mode, where it would be just about narrow enough to be usable?

Apple’s filed extensive patents about how a large, multitouch onscreen keyboard might work, pictured above, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything: Apple’s got more patents than the tablet’s got rumors, and most of them never materialized into anything meaningful. The keyboard patent, for example, also includes drawings of an onscreen clickwheel, and a description of how small interface elements, like the minimize/close/zoom buttons in OS X proper, could be handled on a touchscreen—all of which are terrible awkward, and dissonant with Apple’s touchscreen philosophy so far.

Either way, a single, iPhone-esque keyboard really shouldn’t be the primary input method. It could be a supplementary input method, but to have two separate text input mechanisms seems messy, and distinctly un-Apple-y. Lame, half-baked input seems like the kind of thing Steve Jobs might fitfully shitcan a tablet for, actually, but that’s getting awfully speculative, even for a piece about a product that doesn’t officially exist at all.

Solution 2: Voice Control

Apple’s been on covert voice input crusade since it introduced Spoken Interface for OS X which, if you care to look (System Preferences>Speech>Speakable Items “On”) is still there. As it stands, it’s rudimentary—the iPhone’s Voice Control speech recognition is much more accurate—and though there are quite a few customization options, it’s really just a command system, not a full text input system.

Even more developed technologies like Dragon Dictation are still niche products, and honestly, the concept of controlling a computer entirely by voice is kind of absurd. “Open Browser! Open Gizmodo! Post withering comment about Apple tablet story, with these words!” No. Not now, and really, not ever—the computer as a stenographer is an obnoxious concept, held back by practical concerns, not technological ones.

That said, Apple is very proud of Voice Control on the iPhone, and they haven’t removed voice commands from OS X in over five years. It’s likely that there will be some kind of voice input for the tablet, but that it’ll be relegated to the same job it’s held in the past, taking care of the odd command and initiating the occasional script, and not much else.

Solution 3: The Dreaded Stylus

Styli! The very thing the iPhone was so dedicated to murdering could be the savior of the Apple tablet! Just ask Microsoft.

See, the only other tablet booklet device that’s garnering remotely comparable hype is the Courier, Microsoft’s dual-screen concept device leaked to us back in September. The Courier concept is very different from the blurry image we’ve assembled of the Apple tablet—it doesn’t have a keyboard. Unlike the Apple tablet, though, we know how the Courier is supposed to work:
Handwriting. Apple staked an entire device line on handwriting recognition—the Newton—over 15 years ago, so isn’t it conceivable that they’ve, you know, figured it out by now? Before taking another detour back to the patent office, let’s take a moment to recall Steve Jobs’ original iPhone keynote:

Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus. No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get ‘em and put ‘em away, and you lose ‘em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus. We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with – born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers.

This wasn’t a dismissal of styli. This was a dickish, public obsoleting of styli. If I were a stylus, I would refuse to work with Steve Jobs, on the basis of him being a jerk.

And yet, in November of 2009, an Apple patent, this time describing stylus input and clearly showing a tablet-like device, went public. If you have the will and patience to parse a little techno-legalese, go for it:

Upon the occurrence of an ink phrase termination event, the ink manager notifies the handwriting recognition engine and organizes the preceding ink strokes into an ink phrase data structure…The present invention, in large part, relates to the observation that client applications and handwriting recognition software in pen-based computer systems can make far more accurate ink-related decisions based on entire ink phrases, rather than individual ink strokes.

If not, you’ll have to take my word for it: This is basically the Newton’s Rosetta, updated for 2009.

Stylus input would be a stunning break from Apple’s iPod/iPhone finger-only strategy, and to a lot of people it would seem regressive. Then again, if the tablet is a perfectly predictable extension of the iPhone concept, it won’t revolutionize anything at all. I’m still filing this under “unlikely,” but looking at the evidence, I honestly—and surprisingly—can’t rule it out.

Solution 4: A New Style of Keyboard

The safest bet for how Apple will handle the text input problem is not coincidentally the broadest. Any onscreen keyboard would have to be different than the iPhone’s somehow, but to say that Apple’s tablet will have a new style of keyboard is to say that it will have pretty much any kind of onscreen keyboard that is unlike the iPhone’s. This is not very useful! Luckily, we have guidance, from other companies, and even from Apple.

Split onscreen keyboards are neither new nor common, which makes them kind of perfect: the map has been charted, so Apple needs only to explore it.

The most public of the alternatives is an actual, available product called DialKeys. Coopted by Microsoft a few years ago, this tech, which splits the keyboard into two crescent-shaped virtual keyboards, shipped with a handful of touchscreen UMPCs, a category of devices that died off before it had the time to truly solve the onscreen keyboard problem. It wasn’t very good. But the concept had potential, maybe.

Apple is definitely aware of DialKeys, even if they can’t use it—not that we’d want them to, or that they need to, having acquired a company with a similar concept about five years ago.

FingerWorks, a company specializing in touch interfaces and gesture concepts, was forcefully drawn into the Apple family about five years ago. A lot of their touch gestures actually made their way to the iPhone, albeit adapted from touchpad to screen use, according to FingerWorks employees:

The one difference that’s actually quite significant is the iPhone is a display with the multi-touch, and the FingerWorks was just an opaque surface. That’s all I’m going to say there. There’s definite similarities, but Apple’s definitely taken it another step by having it on a display

Interestingly, FingerWorks had a physical product with a split keyboard, which sat over Apple laptops’ regular keyboards, and which promptly disappeared after their acquisition. From the press release, which, mind you, hit the wires in 2003:

The MacNTouch Gesture Keyboard is a complete user interface that serves as mouse, standard keyboard, and powerful multi-finger gesture interpreter. Mouse operations like point, click, drag, scroll, and zoom are combined seamlessly with touch-typing and multi-finger gesture everywhere on the MacNTouch’s surface. Proprietary hardware and software allows pointing right over the keys, thus eliminating the frequent movement of the hand between the keyboard and the touchpad. The MacNTouch has been designed to minimize stress and it gives users unprecedented control of their computer using hand gestures.

Obviously such a product relates to a lot of aspects of tablet input, so let’s zero in on text: it’s exactly what the tablet needs, basically, except it’s not software. The keyboard is split for possible thumb use, it’s capable of gestures, and most importantly, it’s already owned by Apple.

Best of all, the FingerWorks domain, which proudly displays all of these concepts, was pulled from the internet this week. If this feels like a strange coincidence, that’s because, well, it is.

Making Bets

For all the evidence about the tablet’s possible input methods, there’s no standout answer. Apple’s got a thing for voice input, a history with onscreen keyboards, a patent trail and strong lineage of stylus input, and a pattern of suspicious behavior with and towards new keyboard types. We’ve got a handful of cases here, all compelling, and all conflicting. And the takeaway, if you haven’t picked it up yet, is that nobody really knows.

For my money, though, an adapted, possibly split onscreen keyboard is the best bet, and assuming the learning curve isn’t too steep, the most appealing option. But of the options laid out here, it’s by far the most vague—its FingerWorks ancestor is nearly a decade old, conceived in a time before multitouch screens—so the only truly safe bet is that whatever Apple comes up with, it’s going to surprise us.

If you allow applications to save your passwords, anyone with physical access to your PC can decode them unless you’re properly encrypting them—and chances are pretty good you’re not. Let’s walk through the right and wrong ways to store your passwords.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll assume that the people you allow into your house are trustworthy enough not to hack your passwords, and your laptop has been stolen instead—but the tips here should apply to either scenario. Regardless of how you choose to save your passwords, you should make sure to use great passwords and even stronger answers for security questions.

Once You Click “Remember Password” It’s All Over

Almost any application that requires you to login to something will also provide an option to save your password, and once you’ve done that, your password may as well be plain text. Behind the scenes, even if the application encrypts the account information, it’s doing so with a static key that can be easily deciphered through some reverse engineering, and somebody not only can, but already has created a utility to recover those passwords.

It doesn’t even matter all that much if you’ve got a tough Windows password; anybody with physical access to your PC can use an Ubuntu Live CD to copy all of your data onto an external drive without modifying anything, and crack your files on another machine whenever they please (assuming you don’t have your entire hard drive encrypted). If they had a little more time, they could use Ophcrack to figure out your password, or they could just be mean and use the System Rescue CD to change your Windows password.

Once that person has access to your files, they can recover your passwords with free tools easily—you can recover passwords in a few clicks from Outlook, Instant Messenger, Wi-Fi, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or any number of other applications. All it takes is a quick Google search to find even more cracking utilities.

Pidgin Stores Passwords in Plain Text

That’s right, your favorite open-source, multi-protocol instant messenger client stores your passwords in plain text. If you don’t believe me, just open up your %appdata%\.purple\accounts.xml file in your favorite text editor, and you’ll see your passwords right there for anybody to read.

The decision to store the passwords in plain text is a deliberate one that’s been thoughtfully considered, and while you might initially think it’s a terribly insecure way to handle security, keep in mind that you can simply download any number of utilities like Nirsoft’s MessenPass and recover the passwords from AIM, Windows Live Messenger, Trillian, Miranda, Google Talk, Digsby, etc. The Pidgin developers point out that their option is actually the preferred method for security:

Having our passwords in plaintext is more secure than obfuscating them precisely because, when a user is not misled by a false sense of security, he is likely to use the software in a more secure manner.

The best answer, of course, is to not allow your IM client to store your passwords at all—but if you must store them, you should at least use the built-in Windows encryption, if not a full-blown TrueCrypt setup. Either option would be better than the pseudo-protection most other applications provide.

Password Managers Are the Only Secure Storage

The only truly secure way to store your passwords is to use a password manager to securely track your passwords, combined with a a great master password to protect the rest of your saved passwords—if you use an easy password for your password manager, it would be easy to crack with a brute force attack. Don’t lure yourself into a false sense of security by just using one—your password manager password should be at least 10 alpha-numeric characters if you really want to be secure.

You’ve got a number of great password managers to choose from, like reader favorite Keepass, a cross-platform tool which has many plugins that help you master your passwords and make using a password manager easier to deal with. And, of course, let’s not forget that Firefox has a full password manager built right into the application.

Use a Firefox Master Password (With More Than 8 Characters)

If you want to use Firefox to save the passwords for all your web accounts, you should make sure to enable a Firefox Master Password by heading into Tools –> Options –> Security and checking the box for Use a master password.

Once you’ve done this, Firefox will store all of your passwords with nearly unbreakable AES encryption—providing you use a password with more than 8 alpha-numeric characters and at least one capitalized letter. If you used a weak and pathetic password like “secret”, it could be broken in a matter of minutes with a brute force cracking tool, but a decent 8+ random character password will take at least 73 years for a brute force attack.

Each time you start Firefox and go to a site that requires a saved password, you’ll be first prompted for your master password. By default, the master password authentication will be active for the entire session, but you can use the Master Password Timeout extension to lock your master password again after a certain interval, which is handy if you walk away from your desk without remembering to lock it with Win+L.

Use TrueCrypt to Encrypt Everything

Rather than deal with password managers or whether or not to save your passwords, you could simply create a separate, encrypted TrueCrypt drive, and use portable versions of your applications to keep everything totally secure. If you’re even more paranoid, you can use TrueCrypt to encrypt the entire hard drive—you will be prompted for a password every time you boot, but you can relax knowing that anything you do will be encrypted, even if you use scripts with your passwords stored in plain text. If TrueCrypt isn’t your thing, you can use the built-in encryption functionality in Windows—just keep in mind that if you change your password your data will be inaccessible, and your Windows password can be cracked, giving them full access to your files.

Are you already using a password manager or encryption to keep your passwords secure? Share your best password security tips in the comments.

The How-To Geek uses Keepass and a tough password scheme to keep his accounts secure. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

Here’s your job: Stand for ten hours in a noisy convention center. (You might want to wear something revealing.) Try to get the attention of thousands of men—and a few women—who rush by. And don’t forget to smile.

We didn’t approach these women—models, actresses, circus performers, dancers, students, nurses, programmers—just to ogle and schmooze. We didn’t simply want to collect pretty pictures for readers to drool over. (Although we did that, too.) We wanted to get to know the girls, their pasts, how they came to be booth babes, what they did when they weren’t charming strangers, and what they experienced during their times at conventions such as CES.

Many of these intelligent, charming women had a sense of reluctance when it came to taking members of the press seriously. Often we heard girls talk of men who don’t understand that a “press badge isn’t an excuse” to fondle them as one might touch “everything shiny and pretty” in the booths.

A booth babe‘s job is to lure convention attendees into her booths, to do a product demonstration or to pass people off to a coworker. That’s fine. But when misunderstandings occur—or attendees forget they’re interacting with living, breathing human beings—some attendees turn into jerks, pressing intimidatingly close and crossing boundaries.

Some slip these girls their hotel keys, pressuring them for a visit later in the day. Others mistake professional flirting for actual flirting and try pick-up lines. “Do you know what the speed of light inside a vacuum is? I do.”

We’ve shown off pictures of booth babes plenty and even encouraged ogling them. Others in the tech industry, such as game developer EA, have promoted this mentality to the point of offering a bounty to anyone harassing their booth babes with photo evidence. The point is that these girls are being paid to be pretty and cordial—and we aren’t ashamed to enjoy checking them out and laughing with them.

But there wasn’t a single woman we spoke to that didn’t have at least one icky experience. Let their confessions serve as a warning to you: don’t be a creep.

Many thanks to Adam Lam and Christopher Mascari for assisting with the video, Michael Margolis for sending in a few photos, every wonderful woman who spoke to us (particularly Bob Suicide whose encounter guided along this idea), and every single gal running a booth or promoting a product.