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So last December Santa brought dad and the kids a few nifty wireless phones for the holidays. How on earth are you gonna top that for this month's societal honorees — fathers and graduates? Have no fear, Dad/Grad Day shoppers, for the answer is simple — accessories. With so many customers — nearly 60 million now nationwide — leaping into the wireless world of communication, it’s no surprise that many industrious companies, even beyond San Diego’s five wireless telephone service providers, have come up with new bells and whistles for your portable communications needs.
Some accessories will appeal to more practical users; others will tantalize those more concerned with image. Any way you look at it, though, there is no shortage of gizmos to spruce up your wireless way of life.
Over at InfoPlanet Voice & Data, a wireless superstore along University City's Towne Centre Drive, assistant manager Mike Sisco invokes those magic words in today’s wireless universe — "hands free." Not only do people want to talk on the go these days, they want it as unobtrusive as possible. "We’re selling a lot of the hands-free wireless kits," Sisco confirms. "Most of it’s out of safety concerns."
Personal experiences with inattentive phone-yapping motorists aside, several scientific studies have found some correlation between dialing drivers and increased accident rates. Last year, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study concluding that phone-carrying motorists were four times more likely than average drivers to get in a wreck, roughly the accident rate of moderately drunk drivers.
Hence, an industry within an industry is born. All local providers — Sprint PCS, Pacific Bell Mobile Services, GTE Wireless, AirTouch Cellular and Nextel — offer a variety of hands-free kits for the car and hands-free headsets for walking-and-talking ease.
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Lindsey Burroughs, San Diego area president for GTE Wireless, swears by hands-free car kits — at least she did until moving here from Atlanta in April. "It’s really cool for people who are road warriors. Now I don’t have one because I’ve got a loaner car," Burroughs laments. "It’s very difficult for me to try to talk and drive at the same time."
Here are the most popular versions: If sound quality is top priority, a hard-wired installed car kit is recommended — at prices starting around $200. Cheaper models that plug into the cigarette lighter — some even recharge your wireless phone — run from $25 to $100 or more, depending on a variety of sound-boosting upgrades. Typical car kits come equipped with a speaker, a
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mountable cradle to hold the phone, a clip-on microphone that is often secured to the sun visor — and a power booster in the pricier models.
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For an even simpler solution, you might consider the Jabra EarSet. Developed locally, the colorfully unique EarSet was lauded by the Seattle Times during January's Consumer Electronics Show, the product's debut. The EarSet — running from $39 to $59 at InfoPlanet — features a miniaturized speaker-and-microphone unit that fits comfortably in the outer ear with the help of a patented soft-plastic EarGel. Each EarSet comes with six of the unusually shaped EarGels — for both left and right ears in three brightly color-coded sizes.
"Most of our clients say they wouldn't be caught dead wearing a traditional headset in their car," explains Anita Habeich, Jabra's director of marketing, from the company’s 30-employee headquarters in University City. "The EarSet is very obscure and kind of stylish."
If it’s style you’re looking for, we can only rely on the experts. Pacific Bell is touting interchangeable face plates for its Nokia 2190 phones — from an imitation burled-walnut look for the Rolls Royce set to a reptilian veneer for the Godzilla crowd.
And, of course, don’t forget about cases. Not only a fashion statement, the wireless case also provides some protection from falls, scratches and the elements. Priced from $20 to $60, cases come in a variety of materials — from natural-grain black leather to surfer-ready neoprene — and styles, including cases bearing college logos (check out www.wow-com.com).
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The Jabra EarSet frees hands
so driver may talk safely.
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Also to consider, for those who appreciate more practical gifts: car-lighter chargers, handy for those on-the-road types who sometimes forget to recharge those pesky batteries ($30 to $100, depending on speed of recharge); rapid desktop chargers; and battery eliminators, $20 to $50 devices that literally replace a wireless phone's battery and attach to a car's cigarette lighter.
If it’s the unusual you seek and you’re Internet savvy, perhaps a visit to www.marquel.com would be in order. Once there, you'll find Texas-based Marquel International's newest wireless doodad, the "vibrating belt clip." The device is described as a must for people who "receive calls in noisy environments" — presumably grad parties — or those hoping to prevent "disruption during quiet moments," which might include some Father's Day celebrations. You can order it from the Web site, but I couldn’t find a price for the thing.
And finally, for those who have everything — except perhaps a good sense of direction — New Jersey-based TravRoute Software has developed what it calls "the ultimate road companion." The Door-to-Door CoPilot, for $399 at InfoPlanet, incorporates satellite tracking with state-of-the-art mapping software and voice-recognition technology that, using your Pentium-based laptop computer, literally talks you through your driving experience. Make a wrong turn? No problem, the small Global Position System (GPS) disc that fits on the dashboard senses the change and prompts new directions. Common voice commands are also recognized and the CoPilot even emits a "You’re welcome!" when praised for a "job well done," the literature promises.
And dads will undoubtedly agree that it beats the heck out of another tie. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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