Cool Tools that Don't Work

People who know me, know that I love to try out new tools (some, like my wife, call them toys).   When I meet a new client or have a friend over, I quickly reach into my bag of tricks and pull out some device that I claim has “revolutionized my life!” However, it is right that once in a while I step back after a couple of weeks / months and reassess just how valuable and useful those new tools have become to my daily operation.

So in this article, I’m going to reach deep into the bottom of my bag of tools, pull out those that haven’t been used in a while, and explain why.


The Virtual Keyboard   

This is truly a whiz-bang device. When I heard about it I immediately had to get it, and get it I did. This device was going to change the way I interfaced with my phone from now on. No more messing around with those tiny little keys. I was going to have a keyboard in my pocket that I could whip out anywhere and compose emails to my heart’s content.

The problem: First of all, we can rack up the initial problem that many devices have, and that is “Bluetooth”. Bluetooth, while relatively stable for wireless headsets, seems to give me lots of trouble every time I try and connect something else. In this case, the drivers and set up of the virtual keyboard was a real pain! The phone isn’t expecting a keyboard so the software was tiresome to configure, reconfigure, etc.

Secondly, as you can tell by the picture, this thing needs a dark place to work. That is fine if you don’t mind closing the drapes in your office and shutting off the lights, but it does make you seem rather creepy when a colleague enters the room and sees you hovering over a red glowing keyboard.

But finally, the biggest reason it is at the bottom of my bag is the darn thing doesn’t work! What I mean is that because there is no tactile feedback when you touch a key, it is incredibly tough to type a single word without hitting the backspace key two times for every successful entry. If you are careful and lightly touch and withdraw your hand, you might be able to only have 1 error every other word, but your speed is about 3 words a minute! In the end, it was a very cool device that I loved to show people, but never used!



The Retro Handset

This one hit the junk pile pretty quickly. In fact, I think if you look at one of our last articles, you’ll read me singing the praises of this little device. I thought it would solve one of the problems I have in trying to work in a shared office environment. When people are using those little Bluetooth ear pieces, you can never really tell if they are on the phone. If you had a humongous device like this held up to your head, there could be no doubt, “this guy is talking on the phone!” While it successfully conveyed that message, it didn’t do a very good job of conveying the audio message. The device isn’t really a duplex device. On a “real” handset, as you talk in the mouthpiece, you hear yourself in the ear piece, not so with this device. As a result, you sound a bit “tinny” and muffled. People complained that they really couldn’t hear me all that well and that I sounded like I was very far away. Finally, and this was more cosmetic than anything else, because the manufacturer wanted you to know it was a Bluetooth device, they had to have a little blinky blue light on it. They stuck it in the mouthpiece and when it flashed, it lit up your chin for a second. While the user of the device doesn’t care, those around you are distracted every three seconds with your face lighting up like a Christmas tree. So in the end, down to the bottom of the tool bag this thing fell.



The PolyCom PC Speaker Phone

Of all the devices in this article, this is the one device that came closest to being used on a daily basis. It is well built, had the feel of hardened plastic and metal, and was rugged enough to be bounced around in your computer bag. It connects in via USB (no Bluetooth for this baby) and quickly installs itself as another speaker and microphone for your computer. Because it is designed to work with Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS), a special button on the device brings the OCS client to the foreground and you are ready to roll. The quality is good on both the speaker and the microphone, and it “blinks” when you have a voice mail in your inbox. The problem is that it needs one more thing to be really functional. When you want to dial a phone, you want a numeric keypad, laid out like a normal phone (with the 1-2-3 across the top, 0 at the bottom). This device missed that. It has sound control, call pickup, call ending, but no keyboard. As a result, you are left with your mouse or your computer keyboard to dial the number you wish to contact. While not a fatal flaw, because it is lacking this simple enhancement, I fear that it will soon slip deeper and deeper into my tool bag until I eventually forget about it all together.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. You can bet the bug for new toys (oops, tools) won’t go away soon, so look forward to future articles when I describe the USB enabled toothbrush or the Bluetooth ready coffee cup that has changed my life forever!!!