Belkin’s award-winning vaporware

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Tim Higgins

You gotta hand it to Belkin’s PR team for getting a second award for a product that has yet to make it into either reviewers or consumers’ hands.

The Belkin Cable-Free USB Hub, which was introduced at this year’s CES, won an Editor’s Choice Award from Popular Mechanics in January. And now yesterday, Belkin announced that Popular Science has bestowed its “2006 Popular Science ‘Best of What’s New’ Award” upon the product.

In Belkin’s defense, they didn’t exactly plan on Freescale’s exiting the UltraWideBand device market and having to redesign the product around Wisair’s chipset. But even so, wouldn’t these awards mean more if consumers could actually buy the product and reviewers put them through their paces? According to Belkin’s PR team that won’t actually happen until early to mid December.

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