But here’s the thing: no-one else would be dressed up. It’d be like going to work in a wedding dress; it’d only be so long before that nice lady in human resources suggested I see the ’special mentor’ once a week.

So, scantily-clad ‘booth babes’ at a gadget show in Las Vegas is an equal measure of craziness. And writers, editors and tech engineers have been typing fury over all the mandatory female models hired to sex-up gadgets at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2012 show.

CEO of CES, Gary Shapiro, told the BBC, “Sometimes it’s a little old school, but it does work,” saying people like to gravitate towards “things” that are pretty. He added that the BBC’s efforts to get a story about CES’s sexism was “cute but irrelevant”.

One of the ‘booth babes’ said: “There are women who are into it [ie. technology] but I don’t know any that would choose tech world over shopping or cooking or taking care of kids.”

I’m going to bypass the dark-cave comment. I hope either the BBC spent an entire day tracking down someone to give them the quote or CES paid her a good whack to say it.

But it’s not just across the pond that scantily-clad women are paraded around at tech shows. I’ve experienced much worse in the UK at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the basement of a London hotel for a datacentre conference. And trust me, there’s not much that can be done to sex-up datacentres.

It wasn’t the models that were the problem for me. It was like they were simply dressed up for a hen party and out for the night to have fun. It was the fact they’d been hired, essentially, as titillating eye-candy that was so uncomfortable. The male attendees seemed embarrassed they were being unwillingly targeted in such a way. And the female attendees felt equally so.

Months after the event, a woman working in tech told me how embarrassed she was and how uncomfortable it made her, saying she wouldn’t be going to the conference again. This is the damage done. In an industry that desperately needs women to enter its workforce, it’s not doing a good job at making women welcome.

The real joke’s on the tech industry. Hopelessly trying to sell, sell, sell and alienating half their audience (yes, women buy gadgets and tech too). Get your marketing right and you might just sell a bit more and make a bit more progress.

I mean, the face of Iceland isn’t Kate Middleton, it’s Stacey Soloman. And Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t in L’Oreal’s TV ad trying to sell hairspray to women – Cheryl Cole is. Otherwise, it’s just not appropriate.

Booth babes shouldn’t be banned. A bit like enforcing a quota for women in company boardrooms would be on the wrong side of positive discrimination, forcing CES to stop hiring in booth babes isn’t needed.

According to Lady Geek and Forrester research, four out of 10 high-end gadgets are bought by women. Women already have a grip on the tech world, which is almost certainly going to increase as more and more females enter into technology industry careers.

The tech companies that fail to wake up from the 1970s will soon be as out-dated as its old-school gender perspectives and have no customers to sell to.

Spotify releases preview of mobile application for Blackberry smartphones using premium subscription

Spotify has released a preview of its mobile application for Blackberry devices.

Apple iPhones and iPods, Nokia and Windows Phone devices have had Spotify apps for a while. I’ve been using the iPod app and it’s brilliant –really makes Spotify worth paying for. (You need a premium subscription in order to stream songs over mobile apps).

Features include offline playlists so you can listen to music without mobile connection (and without using up data allowance). You can create and sync playlists.

From using the Apple app, I find the menu within playlists quite clunky. It’s difficult to search artists so you end up endlessly scrolling through tracks. The other annoyance is having to sync playlist tracks over a wi-fi connection every now or then. It’s often difficult to get the app to stay open to sync and so often leaves me without music for my commute.

So, it will be interesting to see how the Blackberry app compares.

The app has been tested on 9780 Bold, 9700 Bold, 9300 Curve, 9000 Bold and 8520 Curve devices.

CDMA-network phones and the Torch 9800 are currently not compatible with the app.

The app is only available as a preview for now.  A fully-tested version will be released to Blackberry App World in the near future.

Click here using your Blackberry web browser to start the installation process.

Spotify is also building a preview version of its mobile app for Linux. Spotify said there are still issues decoding local music on the Linux platform so there isn’t any support for local files. The version is also only available to Spotify Premium and Unlimited customers until they find a way of displaying ads.

The Galaxy Nexus features a HD Super AMOLED display, five megapixel camera, 1.2GHz dual-core processor and NFC (near-field communications) support.

Ice Cream Sandwich has a re-designed UI with multi-tasking notifications and full web browsing. The new Nexus will also feature software navigation buttons.

Google has integrated Android 4.0 with Google+ and extended its cloud services.

“Galaxy Nexus is connected to the cloud, keeping your email, contacts, and all other data synced across your devices. Galaxy Nexus gives users access to more than 300,000 apps and games available from the Android market and you can also buy and read books,” said Samsung in a statement.

The Galaxy Nexus will be available in the UK in November 2011. Google said it will be bringing more services to the UK over the coming months.

Galaxy Nexus gives users access to more than 300,000 apps and games available from the Android market and you can also buy and read books

The Kobo Touch eReader will be stocked across 750 WHSmith stores from Monday 17th October at a starting price of £89.

The Kobo Touch come in a range of four colours with a quilted back. It weighs 185g, E-ink screen and Wi-Fi connection to browse the eBook store.

The touchscreen version retails at £109.99.

The device can hold up to 1,000 books (with expandable storage up to 30,000 books). The Kobo ebook catalogue has over 2.5 million books, newspapers and magazines to choose from, including one million free contemporary and classic titles – like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Unlike Amazon’s popular Kindle e-reader, the Kobo has an ‘open book’ policy, which means users can shop from ‘open’ eBook retailers, such as Google eBooks which launched in the UK in October this year.

“Kobo proudly supports electronic publishing and encourages our users to read a Kobo-purchased eBook on their smartphone, laptop, Kobo eReader (other eReaders using open standards), or other popular devices they choose. Kobo is dedicated to an open cloud-based platform, enabling users to read on any device, and with open standards that give users the freedom to build their lifetime libraries as they choose,” said Kobo.

Kobo is dedicated to an open cloud-based platform, enabling users to read on any device, and with open standards that give users the freedom to build their lifetime libraries as they choose

Considering WHSmith has been struggling in face of demand for online books and magazines, this could give it the boost its business needs.

It would be cool if you could walk into ‘Smiths, have a gander at the books in the paper-flesh and then scan (perhaps using NFC/RFID tags on your phone linked to a WHSmith Wallet service) and download the book onto your reader in-store.

The techie stuff:
With Kobo, users can read ePUB, PDF and MOBI format eBooks; view JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF images; review TXT, HTML and RTF materials; and enjoy CBZ and CBR comic book formats.  Consumers can also easily borrow and read eBooks from the local public library.

HTC has released its new smartphone, the Sensation XL, which runs on Google’s Android operating system (OS) with HTC Sense’s user interface (UI).

At its press bash last week, Cheryl Cole, Lady Gaga and Wil.i.am all turned up to support the release. The Sensation XL has bigged up its screen-size, camera mega-pixels and audio.

The smartphone will be released on the UK market in late November. Pricing and network provider details haven’t been released yet.

Here are Witch Tech’s top five features:

1. HTC Watch

Being first available on HTC’s Flyer tablet, the Sensation also includes HTC’s video streaming technology, HTC Watch. This application allows users to buy movies and stream them on the phone without waiting for the film to download first. Really cool feature but I imagine users will struggle to use it via Wi-Fi until 4G broadband is rolled out across the UK.

2. Quick snap camera

The eight mega-pixel camera has an instant capture feature, which removes the delay between clicking snap and taking the photo. The camera also has a 28mm lens and panorama feature to take wider sky-line shots – and fit everyone in on group photos.

The Action Burst Scene is also good to capture a series of shots in quick succession.

3. Beats Audio

The smartphone comes with a specially-designed ‘Beats’ headset as part of the team-up with Beats Audio. According to HTC, the Beats Audio technology optimises music tracks to match the smartphone’s hardware so you get a better sound.

The Sensation XL also syncs with iTunes accounts.

4. Video recording

The Sensation XL also has a 4.7-inch screen, SRS surround sound and two built-in microphones to improve HD video recording. It also includes LED lights to capture video in low-light environments, although I’m not sure how well this will work considering camera LEDs usually blind their subjects rather than illuminate them.

5. Dropbox cloud storage

The smartphone comes with additional Dropbox cloud storage to let you access your music from anywhere.

There are so many potential issues with this. What about all the cooking mess and grease? What if you’ve fried up your burger and then you suddenly need to check your emails? – you’d have to wait until your laptop had cooled down. How’d you clean it? I have enough trouble keeping my screen clean as it is.

Rather than thinking of it as a laptop, I reckon it’d be better to think of it as an alternative way to follow recipes and cooking instructions videos.

I’m having difficulty seeing anyone making use of this. The only thing I expect my laptop to cook is my lap.

Also – look at that terribly unappetising burger on show. Eww.

Samsung is set to unleash its Galaxy Note smartphone/tablet to the UK market at the end of November.

Samsung claims the Note “combines the benefits of a notebook with the portability of a smartphone”. At 5.3 inches, it’s a large phone or small tablet, whichever you prefer.

The Note is defined by the use of technology called S Pen, a stylus and the full touchscreen. Samsung says this means owners can create and consume on-the-go with minimum scrolling and screen transitions.

It also has a HD super-AMOLED screen, 1.4GHz dual-core processor and runs on Google’s Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) operating system (OS).

The Note was supposed to be accompanied by the release of the Galaxy tab 7.7. But due to a dispute with Apple over intellectual property rights, Samsung has pulled its new Galaxy tablet and the smartphone is going it alone.

I’m not convinced with the stylus idea. Other smartphone touchscreens I’ve used that have optional stylus-use are frustrating difficult to use without the stylus – and using a stylus on the go is even more frustrating. I will withhold judgement for now.

Last week, Amazon launched an attack on the tablet market with its new Kindle Fire tablet. Alongside the release of new versions of its Kindle e-book reader, the seven-inch Kindle Fire tablet has a colour touch screen, can play videos and runs on a custom version of Google’s Android operating system (OS).

So what are the pros and cons of Amazon’s first tablet device?

Pros

The price

It’s retailing at $199, which is very cheap compared to Apple and other Android competitors. The price is set to shake up the market in so far as other Android tablet manufacturers will have to lower prices significantly to compete with Amazon.

The Silky browser

I know, another browser. But I think this is the most interesting part of Amazon’s announcement. Its new ‘Amazon Silk’ web browser is going to speed up web browsing by using Amazon’s EC2 cloud services to power web searches by caching pages.

The Amazon content

Kindle Fire users will benefit from Amazon’s wealth of content, including books, music, video and magazines. It’s what Amazon does best.

If you have a Kindle, you’ll know how easy it is to upload new books using Amazon’s wireless Whispernet technology. Using the same technology, tablet users will benefit from Amazon’s wealth of content, including books, music, video and magazines (let’s hope publishers have used responsive design to cope with another screen size for its content). It’s what Amazon does best.

Cons

Amazon lockdown

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple locking-down its iOS operating system to its App Store and iTunes platform so users can only run Apple-approved content.

With only 8GB of storage, it looks like Amazon is locking down tablets users in a different way.Users will make use of Amazon’s cloud storage to access content.

In addition, users may be tied to apps from Amazon Appstore. It’s still unclear if the tablet will be able to run Android apps from Google’s Market or just Amazon’s Android Appstore. While you could still run Angry Birds, it might be a version of Angry Birds created especially for Amazon users, which means some Android apps won’t make it into Amazon’s Appstore.

Lack of productivity

It’s going to be especially good for e-books and video content. But, compared to the Apple iPad, its seven-inch screen is going to limit the ability to create content

This tablet is all about media consumption. It’s going to be especially good for e-books and video content. But, compared to the Apple iPad, it’ seven-inch screen is going to limit the ability to create content. It even lacks a microphone and camera – as well as 3G connectivity.

The UK

While the US release date is set for 19th November 2011, few UK release dates and details have been announced yet. Some services, like Amazon’s Instant Video service, which will power video streaming on the tablet, is only currently available in the US. Therefore, the UK version of the tablet might have limited content offerings when it’s first released. It could also be more expensive.

The Samsung Galaxy S II runs on Google’s Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, has Wi-Fi connectivity and a 1GHz dual-core application processor. Its 4.3″ WVGA super AMOLED plus, which makes for a lovely display screen.

The handset also has an eight mega-pixel camera, lots of memory (minimum of 16GB and up to 32GB on MicroSD) as well as video recording. The Kies feature is designed for syncing with your desktop and Exchange ActiveSync for emails.

Samsung-specific features include social, readers, music and games hubs.

But, again, like so many new phone designs, it looks similar to an iPhone with its slender rectangular shape and wide display.

See here for Samsung’s demo: