The readers have spoken—and I shall heed your call! Based on the flurry of responses from a Grouse column last month (in which I bemoaned the snake oil sales tactics of the overpriced cable market), there’s clearly a hunger out there for clarity when it comes to parsing the jargon-filled nonsense that’s used to market consumer electronics. Hype is always to be expected when it comes to sales, but unfortunately sometimes conventional wisdom gets swept up in the hubbub and eventually we find ourselves believing in techie urban legends. Great for sellers, not so much for consumers. So taking my own advice, I’m following the Gadgetry Golden Rule and passing on a five choice bits of somewhat counter-intuitive wisdom I’ve had need for and which may inform your next purchase. Pay it forward—hit the comments section with your own, and spread the word.

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It’s the time of year when a boy’s fancy turns to speculating about the new iPhone, or what I’ll call JesusPhone 2: The Resurrection. Though Apple is of course tight-lipped about when it’s due to hit streets, or if it even exists for that matter, anecdotal reports are trickling in from sources both solid and shady about chipsets, design, features, and so-on. General consensus is it’ll grace planet Earth sometime in June, on or around the Apple developer’s conference. In preparation for that momentous event, I’ll guide you on a tour of hopes, dreams and predictions for JP2. And then—you guessed it—I’m going to poop all over them.

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Over the past dozen columns of Grousings, I’ve occasionally, sometimes vehemently, nominated various bits of gadgetry to an ad hoc deathwatch list. In particular I singled out Polaroid photos, home photo printers; disposable batteries; and Sprint’s WiMAX venture Xohm (maybe even Sprint itself, if they aren’t careful). Some of those predictions are necessarily more long-term than others, and some probably wishful thinking.

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I’m going to be straight with you—if you don’t click one of the ads on this page, we’re all doomed. Maybe not today or tomorrow or next week; but if all those banners and pop-ups and pop-unders and interstitials and nagging floating ads continue to be ignored, or worse, blocked outright, we’re every one of us in a mess of trouble. I’m talking the entire high-flying media world dropping from the sky like flaming meteors. Like it or not, we’re all in an economic cold war. However, in this one, we’re fighting against ourselves.

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