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It's almost that time of year again... time for companies to start getting their ducks in a row for the all-important holiday shopping season.

With Halloween still almost six week away, it's not something most of us want start thinking about just yet. (Including me, hence the extra "pre" in the article title.) But part of any smart company's holiday promo strategy is getting coverage in the magazines that will hit the stands during the peak shopping season, and print magazines usually have very long lead times. With that in mind, 50 tech companies converged on lower Manhattan earlier this week for the "Holiday Spectacular" media event, to show off their holiday wares to the New York press.

Phone Scoop was there, as were Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Research In Motion, and Wildseed. While no earth-shattering announcements were made, everyone had a little something new to show off.

Siemens announced two new phones for the U.S. market: the S66 and CT66. However, as usual for Siemens, both models are simply U.S. versions of models already announced for Europe, with few differences other than frequency bands supported.

Still, the S66 is a very notable model. It sports a very large color display, megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and an RS-MMC memory card slot.

Wildseed was also exhibiting at the event. Their first SmartSkin phone - the Curitel Identity - was recently launched by Cellular One / Dobson, a smaller regional carrier. Additional carriers are pending.

I covered Wildseed's SmartSkin concept in depth in my 3GSM report back in February.

Wildseed's main new product was the first gaming SmartSkin. Featuring the game Mortal Kombat, the skin includes extra buttons that transform the phone into a gaming device. That's one of the really neat aspects of the SmartSkin concept - that new hardware features can be added as easily as snapping on a new faceplate.

And it makes a lot of sense for Wildseed to focus on gaming right out of the gate, since graphics performance is one of the phone's strongest areas. But games are not the only way the Identity puts its graphics prowess to use. In fact, smooth animation and slick transitions are completely pervasive in the phone's menus and interfaces. And in camera mode, the viewfinder has one of the fastest refresh rates I've ever seen.

Editor in Chief Rich became fascinated with cell phones in 1999, creating mobile web sites for phones with tiny black-and-white displays and obsessing over new phone models. Realizing a need for better info about phones, he started Phone Scoop in 2001, and has been helming the site ever since. Rich has spent two decades researching and covering every detail of the phone industry, traveling the world to tour factories, interview CEOs, and get every last spec and photo Phone Scoop readers have come to expect. As an industry veteran, Rich is a respected voice on phone technology of the past, present, and future.

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