Playing Gadget Fashion by Ear

Another pen-shaped phone, the $300 Haier P7, is a little less radical in its design than the Nokia 7280 but still oddly elegant. Despite its strange styling (and pen-style pocket clip), the P7 has buttons you can dial with and somehow looks, or so Steve says, masculine. However, neither Steve nor Angela took to the little phone; the interface proved clunky, with a hard-to-use joystick and too-small buttons.

Moving along, the Duo fiddle with phones that slide open, phones that pivot like jackknives, and a curious entrant from Samsung. The N330 has not only a pop-up screen but a technology called VibeTonz, which allows users to choose different patterns for different callers for a sort of kinetic caller ID. A mere prototype at airtime, the phone was nonetheless able to play a driving game that used the VibeTonz tech well. (But if you're buying your phone for fashion's sake, Steve notes, only you will know this technology is there.)

There's also a movement, notes Angela, toward spiffing up devices such as headsets. (After all, you really are wearing those things most of the time.) IPod white remains the fashionable statement, but some companies treat the headset color as a flexible wardrobe choice; Jabra, for instance, makes a model with swappable color panels.

More to Angela's liking, however, was the Plantronics MX300, a model that boasts good sound, a noise-filtering microphone, and a retractable cord; she likes the parrot-green model she tested so much that she plans to buy it from the company once testing is complete. Will it match her laptop bag? Frankly, as long as it matches her nearly 3-year-old mobile phone, she doesn't seem to care.