Sometimes, I'm amazed at how cool and seamless things look on TV. Vendors take great pains to make their products look quick, easy and cool in commercials -- often telling what seems like a whole story in 30 seconds.

If you've seen the Sprint/Nextel commercial in which they blanket the city looking for a missing child -- who turns up right under their noses -- you'll know what I mean. In this commercial, the company is showing off its Direct Connect product, where you can use your cell phone as a walkie-talkie and otherwise use it to collaborate.

I just wish somebody would have told the ad agency that you talk into the microphone, not into the earpiece. It makes them look silly -- even sillier than the actors look holding their BlackBerry smartphones up to the front of their faces.

The Direct Connect product is interesting, though -- if you're a business user who has a lot of real-time communications requirements, especially with lots of people simultaneously. The push-to-talk feature could be handy when you're in a business situation in which you need to connect quickly and repeatedly.

The transportation example in the commercial is a good one. I also can imagine it in use whenever there are a lot of field people at one time, such as at a trade show or conference. One of the more useful features of Direct Connect in these scenarios is the ability to set up a group and do broadcast announcements using the push-to-talk button.

But it's not quite as seamless as it looks on TV.

To use the push-to-talk for a group, you need to set up the group in advance. That's a fair thing to require, because the phone can't possibly be smart enough to know who you want in each group. And of course, each of the people on the other end needs to have a Sprint/Nextel (or Boost Mobile) phone with the same push-to-talk capability.

The part that bothers me, though, is the need to set up each individual push-to-talk conversation in advance. You need to pick out the number (which is different from the phone number), probably from your address book; then alert them that you want to send to them. That allows the recipient to push to open the connection with you -- at which point you can start your push-to-talk (walkie-talkie) conversation. That's a lot less convenient than having the push-to-talk be instantaneous like the way we used to use our CB radio walkie-talkies (for those of you who actually remember CB radio, good buddy).

For several weeks, I carried around a Sprint/Nextel BlackBerry and gave my wife a compatible Sprint/Nextel Motorola phone. Unfortunately we found very few opportunities to use them, mostly because it was much more convenient to use the same devices as regular telephones or texting devices.

Yet, I think there's a pony to ride in this idea that Sprint/Nextel calls Direct Connect. I love the idea of connecting by broadcast to 20 people. And I think that being able to share photos by looking at them on both phones simultaneously has its merits -- both for business collaboration and for the personal type of photo sharing in which "Isn't she cute?" is bantered around freely.

But it's not a natural act; and it seems more suited to specialized business uses, not to home use. Maybe that's why they priced the BlackBerry Curve the way they did. It costs $149 if you add it to a Sprint/Nextel business account. If you're a consumer, you pay $249, then get $100 mail-in rebate.

Ten-four, over and out.