Portable Speakerphone

I have one of those legendary Jawbone BlueTooth headsets. It works great, but I hate having to deal with it: Put it on. Take it off. Forget you have it on and look like a dork. Charge it when you get home. Lose it.

What I REALLY wanted was a speakerphone for my car that I never had to think about. It would just work when I got in and quit when I got out. Well,  now I have one; the BlueAnt ST3.

I tried a bunch of different devices before settling on this one — Sony, Motorola, BlueConnect. None of them met my specs for performance and convenience.

The ST3 is small, just barely bigger than my phone. At first, I was suspicious because of the unit’s small size and light weight. I wondered how much battery power it had onboard (read “talk time” and “standby time”). I’m going to save to you bunch of time and give you the answers: an unbelievable 15 hours of talk time and one month of standby time on a single 3-hour charge.

The sound quality is very good. It’s plenty loud enough even at freeway speeds and the other end of the conversation is ALMOST as good as my Jawbone (which is saying a lot).

If your phone supports BlueTooth directory integration (which the Android sadly does not until later this month), the ST3′s text to speech processor will even announce who’s calling and allow you to voice answer or not, making the unit truly hands-free.

I don’t even bother turning it on or off. When it notices the BlueTooth signal fade as you walk away, the ST3 shuts down. But it has a vibration sensor in it similar to the ones used in car alarms. When you return to your car, the ST3 wakes up, finds your phone, and locks on.

I suppose that some time, a week or two from now, my ST3 will ask to be recharged. It comes with both an AC charger and a car cable, so no problem. Meanwhile, I’m giving it 5 stars.

Rating: * * * * *

Street price: under $100

Related:

BlueAnt Wireless Website

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1. I Fell in Love with an Android
2. Sprint Rolls out Flawed Android Strategy at Developer Conference
3. Pure Seduction: BlueAnt Q1 BlueTooth Headset

QR code in the Wild

That funny looking symbol on my new business card is a QR code. Lately these little beasties have been cropping up on everything from T-shirts to magazine ads.

The QR (Quick Response) code is a two-dimensional bar code that can store contact info, URLs, even paragraphs of text. Although they were invented clear back in 1994, they were relegated to industrial applications until a new generation of consumer electronics made them practical for just about everything.

Now that phones like the Android and iPhone have easy to use software for decoding them, QR codes are spawning a new generation of applications called “hardlinking” or “physical world hyperlinking” that make it easy for consumers to capture data from products, magazines, billboards and even each other’s phones.

You can get your own QR codes to start pasting on stuff at the link below.

Related:

• Make your own QR Code courtesy of ZXing project

• Google image search of social QR code applications

• Silicon Alley Insider, “Mobile Barcodes: Big In France!”

Related posts:

1. Sprint Rolls out Flawed Android Strategy at Developer Conference

"Braindoggle"

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Nixie tubes

Back in 1954, before we had LED’s and digital readouts, Nixie Tubes were the only way to display digital data. Today, these delicate glass tubes are very rare.

I’ve been buying them from decommissioned factories in Russia and designing them into retro electronic devices like clocks and other art pieces.

Nixies fell out of favor as soon as other technologies replaced them because the fragile glass tubes are sensitive to shock and vibration and they require 180 volts to operate.

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