The events at Comdex really gave us a chance
to hear about new and different technologies and people affecting
the computer industry and when the times are tough as they are, it
is a great place to see some really interesting products. Adobe showed us what was new in Photo Shop Elements 2.0
and I can see why it is fast becoming a favorite of digital camera
users everywhere. New features in this program that make it worth
looking at are the batch renaming tool and an auto stitch tool for
merging different photos together. The help files have been improved
and the entire manual is available to you and when you ask for help
while working with a particular tool, the help for that tool comes
up. It has a great save for web feature that tells you how big and
how long it will take to download a particular picture. Another is
the built in web gallery feature to help you quickly build and
upload a gallery of pictures to your web sites. There are also
terrific printing options to allow you to create photo albums or
different sheets of a single photo. The cost is $99 at www.adobe.com.
Adobe also gave us a quick look at In Design, which is an impressive
desktop publishing program that targets high end graphics users.
JASC, www.jasc.com was also at the
event to show off some of their new products like After Shot.
This program is designed for those people buying digital cameras and
wanting to easily handle the pictures. In fact, according to JASC,
in 2002, 16% of households have a digital camera and by 2003, that
number should jump to 20%. After Shot is a great tool to organize
your pictures and has some other pretty neat features as well. The
batch features are good for dealing with a group of pictures, and it
as a very easy to use red eye removal tool. There are quick fix
buttons to help you correct the color balance on a picture and has a
good stitch feature as well to combine several pictures into a
panorama. You can download a free copy of the JASC After Shot
Starter Edition at http://deals.jasc.com/comdx2
Creo, Latin for “I Believe”. Their new
product, called, “Six Degrees” is all about building
relationships between your emails and your files on your computer to
help you get the right information out of your computer. What this
program does is to help you track, organize, and manage your email
messages and the files that come with them to help you quickly find
information you need. Creo, www.creo.com, has actually been around
for a long time in this business (17 years), and is a Canadian
graphics company long into imaging and software and is the world’s
largest supplier of pre-press equipment. So this is a big departure
for them with Six Degrees. The program generates keywords for
subject lines and files attachments in Microsoft’s Outlook program
(not Outlook Express) and gives you a very easy way of finding
messages, contacts, files, and quickly allows you to work with that
information. I think this really has a promising future and can’t
wait till it is expanded to other email programs like Eudora.
The National Cristina Foundation,
http://www.cristina.org/. This organization since 1983 has become a
world wide effort with projects in many countries to bring computers
and technology to those people that cannot afford it. It is a
terrific organization. If you have an older computer that needs a
new home, this is a place to send it to. Their Phoenix project has
refurbished thousands of computers worldwide, in the past 10 years,
has given over 15,000 computers to families and organizations in the
Baltimore Maryland area alone.
Intel Technology Briefing
One of the great things about attending the
events at Comdex Fall is the chance to listen to people that
really know technology give us some insights to what is new and what
to look for. Once such speaker was Pat Gelsinger, VP and Chief
Technology Officer for Intel Corporation. Pat got his start at Intel
as an engineer and quality assurance technician working on the 8086
and 8088 processors. He moved up to work on the really fast 12
megahertz 386 and then was one of the original designers on the 486
platforms. Pat says that one of the first things he noticed about
the speed of the technology was that faster hardware creates a
vacuum that software then rushes in to fill. He then went on to tell
us about what Intel research has found about the personal computer.
For instance, 70 percent of homes now have a personal computer with
40 percent of those having more than one. There are somewhere over
half a billion PCs in use today with the actual 1 billionth PC being
produced and shipped in 2002. By 2005, we will see PC number 2
billion being shipped. Of all those systems, 18 million of those
will be sold in China in 2003. By 2004, their research shows that
web development will dominate the applications being developed.
Online revenues will be jumping very soon as
well. They are predicting that by 2006, online gaming revenue will
be at $1.8b and Digital music revenue will be $1.7b. So with all
this research going on and with the numbers looking so large, Intel
naturally will be a big part of it all and Pat tells us that what
drives Intel today is for them to continue to “Obey the Law”. That
law of course is George Moore’s law of doubling the transistors in a
processor every 18 to 24 months and they have been doing this for
the past 30 years. The good news for all of us is that the cost of
performance drops every time a new processor comes out.
The breakthrough in technology for the next 30
years according to Pat will be the Hyper-Threading Technology (HT)
that is now available in their new 3 gigahertz Pentium 4 processor.
What HT does is to make a single processor look like multiple
processors to the software. There are some packages out there that
take advantage of this and are seeing a 25% improvement in
performance. With a quick calculation, you can see on a 3 Gigahertz
system, something like having an additional 750mhz on your computer.
So look for new software applications taking advantage of the HT.
For a more in-depth look at HT, go to Intel’s web site at http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20021114comp.htm.
Pat also talked about Intel’s upcoming technology called La Grande
Technology (LT). He sees this to be a technology that focuses on a
safer processing environment with hardware means to enable protected
execution, memory, and data files.
The next major technology that Intel is
encouraging is the Universal Plug and Play (UPNP) and Pat says that
there are over 400 companies working on applications and devices. He
sees this technology being the one that can actually bring different
systems together in both the home and office. As the digital home
becomes more of a reality, people will want to be able to plug
different devices into their network and as the wireless local area
networks (WLANS) become hugely popular in the next year, he sees a
lot of mobile devices becoming part of those networks. Right now
there are an estimated 25,000 wireless hot spots in the USA and that
number will balloon.
Another technology that Pat told us about from
Intel was “Banias”, a platform for mobile processors that will
enable high performance, long battery life, seamless wireless
integration, and an innovative form factor. The notebook prototype
he showed us was incredibly advanced showing a super thin design,
extremely bright screen, and was always connected. And it only
weighed in at 2.2 pounds. This is stuff to dream about as I lug my
old dinosaur weighing 10 pounds with cables, batteries, and
struggling to keep it connected. This is great stuff to look forward
to.
Microsoft
One of the highlights of any event is the
Microsoft dinner and presentation. Besides good food, it is always
an entertaining evening whether by intention such as this years
visit by Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome fame, http://www.lockergnome.com
and Leo Laporte of Tech TV fame at www.techtv.com. While very
entertaining, and the old video clips that Leo showed us were real
rib ticklers, Leo and Chris had a lot of interesting things to say
about technology and the ways you can help yourself with lots of
information available on the internet. One of their tips involved
email and helping you and your recipients know the difference
between spam and real email. Check out www.habeas.com for one
solution. What it does is to put headers into an email to help
authenticate the email. Another web site they gave us was
www.aotc.info, the American Open Technology Consortium. This site is
devoted to helping us educate our lawmakers, either in Washington or
at our local levels about technology. Well worth visiting.
We also had a preview of some of Microsoft’s
newest products such as the Tablet PC and the Smart Display. The
Tablet PC is certainly making the news everywhere but the Smart
Display is something new to us. It is a table that connects to your
PC wirelessly and allows you to see what your display would normally
show in a remote location. This unit was from Viewsonic and weighs
just 2.2 pounds. If you look at Microsoft’s web site at
www.Microsoft.com you will also see a wide range of broadband and
networking products. They are presenting a total networking solution
for the small office and home that is easy to connect and setup. And
I think that people will find that the easier software makes the
difference.
Microsoft is also coming out with new versions
of Windows XP Media player as well. Media Player version 9 offers
more features to help smooth out the volume between tracks, a
mini-play mode, and a new info center. What is really neat is the
variable speed option to speed up or slow down the play of the music
without changing the pitch at all. What that means is if you have a
10 minute clip to play and only 9 minutes to play it in, you can
speed it up and may not notice the difference at all. Want to see
some really neat films, try www.bmwfilm.com. Yes, the car company
has a whole series of new and innovative short films. Some new
technologies are coming out including video smoothing technologies
for low bandwidth downloads. The goal is to give you higher quality
film downloads at lower speeds.
There are two new Windows XP operating systems
available now, one of which is part of the Tablet PCs, and the other
is Windows XP Media Center edition. XP Media Center is available
only on new computers that are built specifically for media users
from companies like Gateway and HP (and more to come later), and
while it is mostly Windows XP, it also includes a lot of
enhancements for digital media. Essentially what Media Center does
is to give you control over your home entertainment in both music
and videos and watching TV. You can record for later viewing,
integrate the web with the music, and do it all from a single remote
unit that comes with Media Center. It gives you a single unified
view and way of handling images, video, music, and DVD as well.
Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/.
Handspring
“The Exceptionally Useable PDA Phone”, the
Handspring Treo 300, from Auri Rahimzadeh. I found it a very
interesting visit with Handspring, www.handspring.com, at the one of
the events. The Treo traces its roots from the Palm Pilot of several
years back and what first surprised me was that in our heavily
computer oriented audience, far more people owned a cell phone than
owned a PDA. Peter Skillman, Director, Product Design Engineer,
gave us a very informative and entertaining look at where
their development processes came from, how they did the research
that ended up with what we see today, and how they came up with the
concepts we see. Peter tells us that they had looked at a number of
alternatives and found so many problems such as the odd keypads on
email pagers, no keypads on PDA devices, and the problem of an ever
shrinking cell phone. In looking forward, we hear that the future
of personal computers is in the wireless systems and as many of us
have seen in the past, the best technologies don’t always win. For
the PDA markets, Palm still has 80% of the market in the US and 50%
of it world wide and of course their contention is that you don’t
need Windows on the box. What surprised me was that there are 15,000
Palm OS software packages available today and with the explosion of
cell phone growth, they really see an opportunity to get in that
market. Handspring expects that products like the Treo will be 10%
of the phone market in five years.
What probably causes more problems in the US is
the problem of coverage. They tell us that in Europe, the question
of “Do you have cell phone coverage?” is not an issue. Here in the
US, we have quite a few divergent cell phone technologies and as my
friends found as we traveled around before Comdex, coverage can be a
problem. Of course, I really should not expect to find a cell phone
tower in the middle of Death Valley’s 3,000 square miles but
coverage is a problem we will have to deal with.
As part of the program with Handspring, Andrea
Butter, the former marketing genius behind the Palm products from
1993 to 1999 and noted author of the “Piloting Palm” book (look for
it at www.pilotingpalm.com), had a discussion with the President and
COO of Handspring, Ed Colligan. Their comments were very interesting
to us as they talked about a wide range of technologies. Not
surprisingly, Handspring was not all that impressed with the
introduction of the Tablet PC noting that it had been around for
years with little success. They are impressed though with how
batteries in notebooks and other devices are improving. In talking
about other technologies, they said we shouldn’t look for much
improvement in voice recognition. If you can’t do it very well with
a supercomputer, how can you expect much out of a desktop? Of
course, it will be much easier for command and control types of
applications but don’t expect much more. When asked about Bluetooth,
they seem to think that it is a standard looking for a home. But, if
Bluetooth comes into automobiles and they can communicate with
phones, it might be the answer to hands free access to your phone in
your car.
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Robert Sanborn is an Independent Personal
Computer Consultant and writer for the Indy PC News and can be
reached at
indypcnews@indy.rr.com
Roy Linker is the Associate Editor of PC
Lifeline email him at
roy@PCLL.com
