July 2007, Week 3 -- Hold the Phone

   Hold the phone. No, we don't mean Apple's iPhone, which has received enough publicity to qualify as a galactic event. It's a cell phone for making phone calls. What a radical thought.

   With no more suspense, it's Samsung's Jitterbug. This came out several months ago, but hasn't had much in the way of press coverage. It's not sleek, it's not sexy and it's not even slim, but it sure is easy to use. (And by the way, unheralded in all the iPhone coverage is that Samsung makes both the main processor and the memory for Apple's $500 gadget.) At the moment the Jitterbug is available only in the United States, but that moment will expand.

   We don't need a phone that takes pictures or plays hit songs, and we don't need the world to know we just saw the cutest gal or guy ever. We think cell phones are for making phone calls.

   We'd had five cell phones, ranging in price from $39 to $420, and they all work -- more or less. Some of them were so confusing we couldn't figure out if we had messages. Our Virgin Mobile phone, made by Kyocera, starts by pushing a red button. A red button for starting? Most of the world associates red with stopping. Oh, well. We have a Sony Ericsson phone that takes pictures but requires something like seven steps to do it. Heaven help you if you want an emergency photo of the person attacking someone (maybe even you).

   Which brings us back to the Jitterbug. It doesn't take pictures, browse the Internet, show movies or play iTunes. A clear display on the outside shows us the time and whether or not we have messages. If someone is calling, it displays who it is if the person is in our stored list. You answer just by opening the phone, and the screen tells you to press "No" if you want to hang up.

   You can dial anyone on your list by speaking a keyword. Say "home" and it dials home. The keypad on our model has large, easy-to-read numbers and buttons labeled "yes" and "no." Their use is obvious.

   Another version of this phone has no numbers, just three buttons: "911," "Tow" and "Operator." 911 is for calling the police and "Operator" connects you to an operator. The button that says "Tow" is for towing your stalled car, but you can order the phone with something else on that button, like "Dad."

   This is obviously not for your average teenager. But it is just right for people who are either too young or too old to bother with endless options or just can't be bothered, period. The phone costs $147 from Jitterbug.com and service plans start at $10 a month. Voice mail is an extra $3. Other plans are on the Web site. This is going to be our phone; if we need pictures, we have a camera.

We See Stars -- Too Many

   We spent a couple of nights trying out the new Sky Scout from Celestron, a leading maker of telescopes. It's a beautifully made piece of optical and electronic equipment for scouting the nighttime sky. Turn it on and Sky Scout's built-in GPS locator determines where you are and the time zone. Point the handheld device at something bright in the sky and Sky Scout, says the manual, will tell you what you're looking at.

   For our first try we pointed it at what our newspaper's "night sky" section told us would be Jupiter, appearing above the eastern horizon. Sure enough, there it was, big and bright. Sky Scout's digital display, however, informed us we were looking at a globular cluster 2,200 light-years from Earth. When we tried another object, we were informed it too was thousands of light-years away, though Bob was pretty sure it was Saturn, which is only light minutes away. (Note: You can see Saturn and its rings with a top pair of binoculars, so this was not a tough test.)

   Later the next evening, as the old silent movie signs would read, we tried our luck from a beach 14 miles outside Chicago. The device gave us a message saying there was too much magnetic interference to pinpoint our location (what magnetic interference?), but after a while it found us. We then pointed Sky Scout at the moon, a pretty big target. Apparently it wasn't the moon, because the Sky Scout display informed us we were looking at the binary star Theta Aurigae, 173 light-years away. Gosh, it sure looked like the moon.

   The device has tons of rave reviews from users commenting at Amazon.com. Amazon is selling it for $399, by the way. The rave reviews make us wonder, as we have many times before, just who posts them. They must be from a different planet, because on our humble orb, this one goes in the techno-junk pile. There's a slight chance that our unit is defective, the company told us, and they would send another one. But it's been several weeks, and we've stopped holding our breath.