Okay...here's my story (in case anybody wants to hear it):
I'm in the Boston area and so I checked the online stock and it was listed as out of stock in my nearest store in Cambridge (just down the street). It's listed as in stock in the Brighton store so I walk all the way to the bus stop and ride for 40 minutes to Brighton and in that store, they couldn't find any of them (and warned me never to use the online stock-checker feature again). Drats. I wasted $1.50 on bus fare and 3 hours of my life.
Later, I go to my Cambridge CompUSA to look for that scanner everybody's talking about. On a whim, I check out the modem section and lo and behold, there's 2 Hi-Val 56k modems and an ArchTek one which I purchased (each for $4.88).
Even later after that, I go home, and open up the Archtek one and I notice that there's no ESS chips on it (TI chips instead) and that this thing's ISA and has jumpers. It turns out that it's the 5643BTS which is a hardware version with speakerphone and voice and stuff. Totally weird, and totally a steal for 5 bucks. The SKU# for that one is 273875 but it's not listed on the webpage to search for availability. (I couldn't find much info on the archtek site because it's slow and unreliable but there's a mini-review on it
here).
Moral of the story--don't bother checking the webpage for availability. It's actually contradictory and deceitful.
Second moral of the story--look out for the 5634BTS version which is also discounted to $4.88 because it's a hardware modem. I haven't installed it yet but I'm willing to bet it'll blow away even the best winmodem.
way