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Look, Up In The Sky -- It's A Mobile Phone!

Attending the Nokia press conference to announce the new WiMax edition N810 Internet tablet today required me to break at least a couple of my rules for living. The first one was "Never sign a liability waiver on April Fools' Day."

The waiver was required because Nokia proposed to lift me, and about 60 other journalists, 20 at a time, 180 feet in the air via crane while we were strapped into jumpseats around a sort of metal boardroom table, to which sample units of the new mobile computer had been affixed. The crane was sitting in a parking lot outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. This must have seemed like a brilliant marketing idea to the geniuses who dreamed it up back in Espoo, Finland -- and, to be sure, the media turnout was sizable.

Partly that's because the actual product announcement, the WiMax-ready N810, is a pretty cool product that is slightly ahead of its time. There are, to date, few actual places where WiMax service is actually available. Sprint is rolling out its Xohm WiMax service later this spring in selected big-city markets, and little-known startup Xanadoo, using Cisco/Navini technology, has begun offering service in certain midsized cities including Lubbock, Texas. That means that having a WiMax-ready device is mostly a conversation piece, right now, but it demonstrates that Nokia, the world's No. 1 maker of mobile handsets, is committed to the technology.

The crowd was also due, though, to the fact that people love a gimmick, especially one that involves being hoisted 20 stories above Sin City on what was essentially a high-tech swing set. Luckily the wind was low today. Going up in the contraption would have violated Rule No. 2, which was expressed in a line from the Robert De Niro character in the movie Ronin: "Never walk into a place you don't know how to get out of." In this case it would be, "Never go up 20 stories on a crane without a parachute."

I was prepared to do it anyway, but that would've involved waiting an hour or so in the Vegas sun. I decided I had more pressing obligations inside the Convention Center.

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