Crave

HP is poised and ready to send a barrage of printers to our office, and to that we say, "Bring it on!" This won't be the first time we've been deluged with printers from HP, and we're eager to get back in the ring. Need proof? Just last August, we became a storage shed for HP's massive photo printer rollout. This time around, it's the small and medium business side that gets a product boost with 11 new inkjet and laserjet printers that HP claims will increase flexibility and grab attention at a lower price point. Some of the printers will be released March 1 with the rest following suit in the coming months. Let's size up the beast:

Officejets:

HP Officejet J3680 All-in-One

(Credit: HP)

Laserjets:

USPS sticker not included

(Credit: HP)

HP's newest line of SMB printers are simple and to the point. They aim to provide the most utility and include a comprehensive set of features, while maintaining an affordable price for home and small offices on a budget. Though most of these printers won't win any beauty pageants, we're excited to put them through their paces.

Why is it that your typical office phone stinks compared with the one you have at home? Here are a few of the ways they are harder to use, do less, and look uglier.

Office phones are ugly: They are typically anonymous black blobs with boring key shapes and colors and utilitarian speaker grills. Stylistically they are circa 1985 and made with shiny black textured plastics that would embarass a home phone or cell phone.

Office phones are hard to use (part one): They typically come in two types: Those with just one cryptic "function" button that through a combination of numeric keys controls a variety of functions like call-forwarding, changing the ring volume, and so on. Or they are of the type with an LCD screen, a bunch of soft keys, and equally cryptic abbreviations of functions like "RngAgn" and "SScUsr". Either way, to do anything more advanced than take and make calls requires a trip to the manual (if you have one). Why is it still considered a blessed miracle when a three-way conference call is successfully connected?

Office phones are hard to use (part two): And don't get me started on the voice mail commands. Have you met a voice mail system yet that has numeric key commands that make sense? Why is the first choice always to leave a message rather than pick up your messages? Since when have I called my voice mail to leave a message for someone else? Yet on many voice mail systems button 1 is for leaving messages, and button 2 is for retrieving them. And then you have things like dialing 7-6 to delete a message, or 8-4 to "administer your outgoing message"--where is the logic in that?

Office phones are hard to use (part three): We have VoIP phones at our office that have lots of snazzy features. Problem is they are impossible to access without a manual to remind you about what they can do, and how to do it. Office phones have blown the integration of hardware, software and services to such a degree that they are now the hardest piece of equipment to use in an office. In software development it is common knowledge that 70 percent of features never go used by most users. With office phones I'm sure it is over 90 percent. It's hard to even do the basic things one expects in a cell phone, such as storing names in a phone book or speed dial. (I'm not holding up cell phones as a paragon of usability, far from it, but it shows how archaic office phones are.)

Office phones have cords: Why am I tethered to my desk? You almost cannot buy a home phone with a cord anymore, even the cheapest sub-$40 phones are cordless. Now I'm sure there are practical reasons for this--interference from lots of phones in one area, mixing up which handset goes with which base--but really there must be ways around these. Cordless and cell phones have led us to expect untethered talking, and it helps with productivity because one can do other things while talking on the phone. So at the office, where productivity is very important, why am I prevented from doing so?

There's probably more, but you get the picture. Can someone please step up and drag office phones into the 21st century? We'll all be better off.

VoIP and telephony service babyTEL is launching a new Facebook application this morning called Telephone that gives you access to a phone and answering machine without leaving Facebook. Instead of going the embedded route, like YackPack, babyTEL instead relies on a small Java runtime that sits in your computer's taskbar, or the dock if you're on Mac OS X. Once you fire it up, there's a simple authentication process to pull up your list of friends on the social networking service, and allow you to call them for free--assuming you have a headset or speakers and a microphone.

You can initiate calls in two ways. The first is through the Java application's built-in directory. Assuming you have friends who have added the application, they'll show up on your buddy list. You can also start a call right from Facebook, although both parties need to have the Java application up and running, which could potentially be a problem if somebody's away. Luckily, there's a built-in voice mail service that will let your callers leave a message, which you can personalize at any time. Voice mail messages will go straight to whatever e-mail address you give the service, so you can grab them later. The application will also log each of your conversations by date, time, and with whom you were talking, although there's no way to record a conversation.

If there's one shortcoming to this application, it's that it requires both parties to add it to their collection of applications on Facebook, along with running the Java application on their Mac or PC. This is a lot more work than an offering like Yackpack considering you're basically getting the same functionality. You're also missing out on the complexities of status messages, to let you know if a friend is away and will return shortly, and the option to make such changes on your own status. If you're going to put anything on your computer, I personally think Skype is a far more compelling VoIP platform, and also has the extensibility of adding quick "call me" buttons on your blog or social networking profile.

If you've talked to somebody on babyTEL's Telephone Facebook application, the service will log it for you. To call them again, just click the giant green call button.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Yubz lets you talk on a new cell phone through an old-school handset.

(Credit: Yubz)

For a while, there seemed to be no end to the incredible shrinking of cell phones. The tinier your handset, the cooler you probably thought you looked around 2001 or so. But the trend has slowed, thankfully, and in some circles, there's a backlash against handsets that required toddler-size hands and heads to talk comfortably.

Take the Yubz retro handset, for instance. It's the same design from many millions of dial and push-button telephones in the 1970s and '80s, before cordless became king. The earpiece would fit snugly between your ear and shoulder as you walked several feet in any direction, before nearly tugging the cord out of the socket.

Toting Yubz around town is likely to start conversations.

(Credit: Yubz)

Now you can take that earpiece on the road by plugging the $45 Yubz into your mobile phone. I spotted Yubz this last weekend at the Real Goods store during the SolFest fair of all things green, a few hours north of San Francisco. There, the selling point was that Yubz allows you to make cellular calls without frying your brain with radiation, keeping the cell phone tucked away far from your skull. Yubz plugs into many popular phone models, but you'll need to purchase an adaptor for the Motorola Razr and some others.

You can also hook up Yubz to a laptop and use it for VoIP calls through Skype and popular IM clients that enable voice calls, including those from Yahoo, Windows Live, AIM, and Google Talk.

This product is designed to please fashion victims with an eye for vintage telecommunications, who can mix and match cord, earpiece, mouthpiece, and handset colors.

The GE 28118FE1 (left) and 28106FE1 Ultra-Slim cordless phones

(Credit: Thomson)

There are so many products announced at the January Consumer Electronics Show, a few of them always manage to slip off your radar. For me, one such product was the new line of GE-branded cordless phones from Thomson. I know what you're thinking--"Thomson" and "GE" are yawner brands that have no place among your carefully groomed hipster-approved gadget lineup. Well, think again: I was able to spend some quality time with the new GE phones last night, and each of them offered at least one compelling leg up on competing products. Each model is a DECT 6.0 product (Digital Enhanced Cordless Technology), meaning it operates on the 1900Mhz wireless band that's free of the interference issues that can occur on the more-crowded 2.4Ghz band (which competes with everything from microwave ovens to Wi-Fi to wireless speakers). A quick roundup of the key models follows:

Remember those retro phones sold in Pottery Barn catalogs for $80? They had become such a symbol of useless consumerism that "Seinfeld" made sport of them a decade ago.

Granted, the same argument can be made against the reincarnated Princess phone from Wild and Wolf, which we found on Shiny Shiny updated with buttons and redial. But for us, it brought back memories of our older sister yacking with her friends before the senior prom. (Yes, we're dating ourselves again.)

And aside from pure nostalgia, the Princess' sleek mid-century design gives it more of a culturally iconic appeal than the shlocky Pottery Barn phone, which looks like it should be sitting on a fake shelf at TGI Friday's. Thankfully, it won't be available until November--so we can't make an impulse purchase that we'll surely regret later.

(Photo: Wild and Wolf)