Pantech’s new Impact is now officially part of the AT&T line up today according to Pantech. The quick messaging device features a haptic touchpad that side flips to reveal a long qwerty keyboard. The phone will sell for $99 after rebates and contracts. Remember haptic feedback? When users press on a touchscreen the phones buzzes more »

This is where we call out by names the actions and companies that seem odd, out of touch or just plain straight up smokin crack. Technology is an odd realm where PR speak doesn’t hold a lot of water if the 1s and 0s don’t line up. This week sees posturing, positioning and flat out insanity. Here is what caught my eye this week:

iriver’s Korean site has started showing off the company’s latest portable media player, which was originally previewed during CES 2008, the iriver Spinn. This 3.3-inch player sports and AMOLED touchscreen display and haptic feedback feature. It supports various music formats including MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC and ASF as well as video formats including MPEG4, WM9 more »

Cowon has announced its latest touchscreen media player, the P5. Featuring a large 5-inch, 800×480 touchscreen display, the P5 boasts of haptic feedback mechanism which simulates a physical button through vibrations. The P5 runs on a fast 700MHz processor and can decode full DVD-resolution video in offline formats including AVI, DivX, MPEG-1/4, WMV and XviD. more »

Motorola has announced its latest music tech phone gadget, the E8 Music Phone. The E8 features a ModeShift, which lets you navigate through the phone’s features. This shows how the buttons change as icons shift according to what feature the user is into. It allows for an easy-to-manage set of music controls. However, the E8 more »

“You have to try out the Motorola ROKR E8″ says Gadgetell Executive Adam Berger – which means in his code: “get you butt over to Moto’s booth and get some info.” So I acquiesce to his demands and bebop over to the jam-packed Moto booth and start playing with this music phone.

This phone appears to be your average joe music/basic phone…right up until you touch the keypad. If you close your eyes -and I did- it feels like you are depressing a button. But it is a touch screen surface. What you are feeling are tiny location specific vibrations. It truly is remarkable. At first, I kept holding the phone up to see if the screen was giving or what kind of trickery was involved; it was that good feeling. I found nothing but the marketing guy smirking at me. But it gets better.

I flew to Las Vegas, as did many of us, with the anticipation that this CES would showcase the collective response to the iPhone brought out at last year’s Macworld. Apparently, that was naive. I fully expected to be “wowed” or perhaps even “bowled over” by the big guns (LG, Samsung, Sanyo, Motorola, Sony Ericsson). Instead, largely I was non plussed. I showed up for all my booth tour appointments and waited to be shown their response. After all they’ve had just about full year since getting a public glance at what was coming.

To me, CES was the perfect launching pad for return volley. A response from the makers at this show, would have