$150 can buy you a dang fine toothbrush nowadays. I've been trying out the Oral-B Triumph with SmartGuide for the past week or so, and my teeth are just a bit geekier now.

The toothbrush comes equipped with an RFID chip in the brush head that wirelessly transmits your brushing data to a small receiver with a screen (Bluetooth would've been too clever, so the brush uses 2.4-GHz ISM band). The screen displays the info, letting you know if you're brushing too hard (which recedes the gums), as well as how long you've been brushing. There's also a screen on the brush itself, which displays remaining battery life.

According to Oral-B, proper brushing takes two minutes, while most people only spend 47 seconds on it. The Triumph starts clocking you as soon as you turn the toothbrush on, breaking the two minutes up into 30-second intervals, one for each quadrant of your mouth. At the end of each 30-second interval, the toothbrush pauses for a second to alert you that it's time to move on.

When you're actually conscious of how much time you're taking to brush your teeth, 30 seconds per quadrant seems to go by too fast. Of course, while brushing with wireless technology is handy and geeky, you can pick up a timer at your local 99-cent store and get much of the same benefits as the $150 Triumph.

Still, my teeth really do feel cleaner, and I'm sure I'm brushing longer now. As someone who just got my first filling last week, it's probably worth $150 to up my odds of not having to get any more.

Plus, it's fun to have a toothbrush with two displays. If Oral-B made one of them a color screen and included some onboard memory, I could watch Lost while brushing my teeth. If they made it a touch screen and included phone capabilities and OS X, I'd wait in line for days and pay $600 for one. Now that'd be a toothbrush...

The Triumph will hit stores in September.