Others think (non-iPad) tablets and daily deals.

According to new consumer data from PriceGrabber.com, topping the list of electronically-oriented Valentine’s Day gifts purchased over the past couple days are the HP Slate 500 tablet — remember that one? — and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF 101 tablet. The results, which will be released in full later today, are based on merchant referrals through PriceGrabber, a Kayak-like, Experian-owned site for comparative shopping.

Also in PriceGrabber’s Valentine’s Top 3: A 55-inch 3-D LED TV from Samsung; with a price range of $1,995 to $3,528, this love offering is probably best for someone you’re truly committed to.

This latest report only factors in purchases made on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Over the weekend, Apple’s 64 gigabyte iPhone 4S was one of the most popular purchases, alongside that big Samsung TV.

The shopping survey also indicates that the daily deals sector might get some love this year, with 42 percent of shoppers saying they plan to use an offer from Groupon or LivingSocial for purchasing gifts.

In my own inbox, I’ve gotten some pretty interesting deal offers over the past few weeks — including (but not limited to) his-and-hers massages, half-off flower bouquets, and a “bargain”-priced private dinner at Le Cirque (no sign yet of last year’s shooting-range deal for Valentine’s Day).

Despite the lean toward coupons — and in spite lingering economic woes — the majority of U.S. consumers plan to spend the same amount on this Valentine’s Day as they did last Feb. 14, according to PriceGrabber’s report.

(Image credit: Harle/Flickr)

In a post last week, BoomTown wrote that Cisco would introduce a consumer telepresence product.

It did today in San Francisco at a press event. It is called, inexplicably, “Umi” telepresence.

I’ll be honest, it sounds like the kind of sushi I typically refuse to eat, because I am not as adventurous as I like to pretend I am.

Actually, it seems to be a variation on you-me.

Get it? You and me and telepresence. As in “Star Trek” for non-geeks.

According to Wikipedia, here are some other definitions for the word:

“Umi may refer to: Umi, ‘sea’ in Japanese language; UMI, Universal Mobile Interface; Umi, Fukuoka, a town in Japan; Umi-a-Liloa, the king of the island of Hawaii; Umi Ryuzaki, a character in the fictional manga series ‘Magic Knight Rayearth’ by CLAMP.”

“Connect with a touch of the button,” is the motto for the giant Silicon Valley networking company for Umi.

And, frankly, I wish I could have telepresenced from my bed at home with it.

You can, using Umi with your existing high-definition television and high-speed broadband. It’s in three parts: A camera, a remote control and, ugh, yet another set-top box to pile on the rest on the shelf in your home living room, as you can see below.

Cisco said the device is scheduled to be available to consumers on November 14 in Best Buy (BBY) Magnolia Home Theater stores, as well as at bestbuy.com and umi.cisco.com “for the suggested retail price of $599 with a monthly fee of $24.99 for unlimited ?mi calls, video messaging and video storage.”

At the short and sweet event, Cisco execs touted their entry into the crowded consumer video-conferencing arena.

“It’s all about tasting the chocolate,” said Cisco exec Gina Clark about her box of Umi, which will work with Google Voice Chat–but not Skype and Apple (AAPL) iChat yet.

It also has the seal of approval from Oprah Winfrey, who will doubtlessly use it in some Oprah manner on her talk show.

Clark mentions tasting the chocolate several more times to knock the point home that if you try it, you’ll like it.

I can’t believe I ate the whole Umi!

Now, Cisco–which really is obsessed with the chocolate metaphor today–is making me have a chomp in a demo.

And, while I am no reviewer, it is pretty sweet, and looks great, well beyond what is available via Internet video chat.

Until the inevitable shaky video appears, here is the full press release from Cisco (CSCO):

Cisco umi Press Release

Guess what? It’s yet another online company going gaga over Twitter integration–this time LinkedIn is announcing a partnership with the microblogging service.

Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) recently announced various ways they were lacing their various services with Twitter’s feed, mostly around search.

But LinkedIn’s partnership with Twitter is a little more robust and will roll out to everyone on the business networking site, according to a blog post by Allen Blue, LinkedIn’s co-founder and VP of product strategy:

“The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.”

I spoke to Blue yesterday, and he said the deal was good for both sides.

“We want our users to get the broadest distribution possible to find what they are looking for,” said Blue. “And Twitter is trying to find ways to increase the value for business people on Twitter.”

Here is LinkedIn co-founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone talking about the peanut butter and chocolate of it all in an adorkable video (it made me hungry, so excuse me while BoomTown goes and raids my kids’ Halloween stash):

The Chocolate can make and receive phone calls and text messages, but it’s designed as a music player first. In fact, it was crafted to look like an Apple iPod, right down to its most prominent feature, a navigation wheel. Verizon is heavily hyping the Chocolate, hoping to capture some of the same sort of buzz that catapulted the iPod, and later Motorola’s RAZR phone, into the status of cult-style accessories.

The Chocolate will hit Verizon stores next week and is available at Verizon’s site for $150.

While the Chocolate may look like an iPod, however, it doesn’t work like one. In fact, as a music player, it functions like an iPod designed by a committee. It’s burdened by a ham-handed user interface and other failings that would get its designers fired at Apple. As a result, the Chocolate, which I’ve been testing for a week or so, isn’t as good a music phone as, say, the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone.

The Chocolate is available now at Verizon’s Web site for $150, after a $50 rebate, with a two-year contract. It will reach Verizon’s stores next week. If you’re serious about using it for music, however, you’ll have to shell out an additional $100 for a 2-gigabyte memory card, which can hold about 500 songs in standard MP3 format. That’s because, incredibly, the Chocolate comes without a memory card, and has a pitiful 64 megabytes of internal memory for storing songs.

This phone is handsome. It’s a black slider design, small and light. Unless you slide it open, the phone keypad is hidden and all you see are the roomy screen, the navigation wheel and glowing red control indicators. It has a decent camera that can take still pictures and crude videos. Unlike an iPod, the Chocolate can play music through a built-in speaker, which sounded very good to my ears.

The best user interface elements on the Chocolate are two buttons on the right side, which take you directly to the music player and camera functions, so you don’t have to wade through menus. These buttons are called out by little labels at the right edge of the screen. But it’s downhill from there.

One big problem is that cool-looking wheel. It turns out that, unlike on the iPod, it isn’t a wheel at all — just a common five-way navigation pad made to look like an iPod wheel (in the popular European model of the Chocolate, it had a rectangular shape). While it is touch sensitive, like the iPod’s wheel, you can’t scroll with it by moving your finger across it in a circular motion. You have to press the buttons in the middle and at the corners.

Worse, the touch sensitivity is poor. While you can adjust how sensitive the wheel buttons are, I found them to be either so sensitive that it was easy to accidentally activate them, or so insensitive that you had to hit them twice — hard — to get things done.

In another bad design decision, the “end” button that terminates calls, turns the phone on and off, and gets you back to the home screen, has been moved from its traditional position across from the “send” button to the side of the phone. This requires a major adjustment and is awkward, because the button is very small.

The music application itself is pretty standard, but is full of unwelcome surprises. For instance, when you turn on the phone, you can’t start listening to music immediately if you store your songs on the memory card, because the player has to load the songs from the card each time. You can set the player to shuffle through your songs, but if you manually advance to the next tune, it goes in order, rather than picking a random song.

And the Chocolate doesn’t handle your MP3 files properly. I loaded the card with 208 very standard, unprotected MP3 files — files that are perfectly recognized on all computers, phones and portable devices I’ve tested. But the Chocolate failed to read the song information — artist, title, album — on all but a handful of them. So I could select them only by file name.

I had a similar problem with my personal photos. Of the 16 picture files I loaded onto the card — again, standard files I’ve used to test numerous devices — the Chocolate could display only four.

In fact, the Chocolate’s multimedia features are really designed mainly to encourage users to buy songs, pictures and videos from Verizon’s online download and streaming services — VCast and Get It Now — not to let you use your own content. The phone works much better with $2 songs you buy from VCast (twice what Apple charges) than with free songs you load onto it.

This is the opposite of Apple’s model. Its iTunes Music Store exists to sell iPods, and the iPod works perfectly with music from other sources, even if you never buy a song from Apple.

I do believe that, someday, the merger of the cellphone and the music player will result in a great device for consumers. But the Chocolate isn’t it.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.