|
|
|
| Technology Today Fall Comdex 2001 The
Comdex show was almost as much known for what it wasn’t as for what it was. No
big booths by companies selling computers like Gateway, Dell, IBM, and Compaq to
impress us, these four didn’t even have a booth, and even more surprising,
companies like Creative Labs was also a no show. If you were at the ICS meeting
in October, you saw what really neat and exciting products that Creative is
coming out with its Audrey line of audio cards. For sound, you can’t get much
better but they were not to be found at Comdex. But
what was there was surprisingly enough, interesting as I did find quite a few
things worth mentioning. It was a much smaller show with attendance estimated
anywhere from 80,000 to 130,000 and the people at Key3Media (the organizers),
keeping pretty mum on real numbers. The number of booths were less and they took
far less floor space this year as well and for the most part, was easier to get
around without having too much trouble going through some of the bigger booths
to see what was on the other side. The lack of give aways and trinkets given out
also attest to the slowing economy, smaller attendance, and general nervousness
of the times. The
big themes this year were digital imaging and wireless networking as well as the
pavilions devoted to Bluetooth, USB, and the Palm platform. As to what I found
interesting, here is my list in no particular order. Kensington,
along with some other companies, are coming out with lights that plug into the
USB port on your computer. Intended for laptop use in dark places (like an
airplane, the bedroom at night, and so on), it takes a tiny bit of power
directly from the USB port to give you enough light to use the keyboard, view
papers, or the like. With a flexible neck, you can bend it to whatever angle you
need. Called the “FlyLight”, About $20 at www.Kensington.com Electric
Fuel, www.electric-fuel.com, makes a line of environmentally friendly
rechargeable units for devices like Pocket PCs, Cell phones, Palm units, and the
like. With this charging unit, you don’t need to worry about having
electricity nearby when using the devices. A replaceable and disposable
cartridge gives you up to three charges for you phone or PocketPC device. This
booth we went out of our way to find because once you are there, you can use
your cell phone to call their Pepsi machine to get a free drink. That is right,
you call the vending machine, it asks you what you would like, and then you pick
up your drink. Course, what they are really after is a means of setting up your
credit card ahead of time and then you don’t need to worry about carrying
around change. You can also do the same thing via infrared and your palm hand
held computer. www.wirca.com or pepsi.wirca.com Need
a quick and easy way to destroy all those old sensitive CDs? The Cdestroyer
(found at www.pressit.com) uses a heavy granulated type material to semi
pulverize the label portion of the CD you want destroyed. About $10. McAfee.com,
www.mcafee.com gives you an online way of checking for viruses that is different
from what we used to know as McAfee over at Network Associates. Download their
software, after you buy it online, and you can get a one-year subscription to PC
World magazine. Good deal. Go to
www.mcafee.com/comdex for the magazine deal.
What sets mcafee.com apart is that they have some new automated update
tools to keep you from worrying about having to update your virus definition
files. One
of the most promising tools I found at last years Comdex was from Biolink which
had a mouse that included a thumbprint scanner to make sure that who ever was
logging on to your computer was who they really said that they were. Another
company was there this year, SecuGen, www.secugen.com, a Canadian company, that
has come out with a similar device but also include keyboards, mice, and a stand
alone fingerprint scanner that I would much prefer. The problem with the mice is
that if you don’t quite like the feel of the mouse and want to get another,
you are stuck because you can’t have both at the same time. The
neatest tool on the floor is from a company called Hash, Inc, www.hash.com. It
is Animation Master and the things they showed us on the demo floor were
stunning. I have seen stuff here that was more impressive than in a Disney film
it is that good. There are hundreds of features for modeling, rendering,
animation, and a number of built in options for everything from hair type to
particles, weather, materials, dynamics, and sound tracking. An incredible
amount of tools and features for only $299. Another
animation tool in a different light is Bryce 5 from Corel Corporation,
www.corel.com. This program is a powerful 3D landscaping and animation program
that will allow you to create and add realistic looking landscapes to existing
images. Want to put yourself and your product in the middle of a terrific beach
you can do it with this program. The
E-pen from E-Pen In Motion, inc, www.e-pen.com is a take off on the old tablet
system that you could write on and transfer the images electronically to your
computer. What this does is to use an optical and ultrasonic technology to
capture what you write on any piece of paper that you clip to their receiver
which is connected to a USB port on your computer. Use it with recognition
software either built in or from third parties to recognize what you write. For
about $179. As
they did last year, Intel has teamed up with a number of companies including HP
to create newly designed computers that are both artistic and functional, and
fun to look at. From HP came the Concept PC 2001 unit that comes with hardly any
internal expansion but does come with five USB2 and two FireWire ports. You use
an 18 inch LCD monitor with an integrated CD-R drive, Web cam, Bluetooth, and a
speaker built in. Pretty slick.
With Legend Computer in China, the Taishan is another concept PC includes a
15inch LCD with a built in DVD drive. See both of these at http://developer.intel.com/technology/easeofuse/conceptpc.htm. Turtle
Beach has long been one of the premier audio companies for the computer world
and this year they were showing off the AudioTron, a digital music player for
home networks. It is a smart stereo component that uses a PC network connection
to play digital music files stored on a PC hard drive or from Internet radio
broadcasts. By storing and assembling the music on your home server computer,
you can then play any of this music through traditional speakers from the
Audiotron console from anywhere in your home. At $299, I am not sure I want one
for every bedroom, living, dining, study, library, family, den, workshop, and so
on if you catch my drift but it is an interesting technology. What you do is to
turn your computer into your giant jukebox with thousands of Wav, MP3, or
Windows Media files. www.turtle-beach.com We
still saw a lot of the tiny digital pen type cameras and a new one from Aroma,
www.aromaco.com actually includes a digital camera, PC Camera, digital camcorder
all built into the same ADG-5000 unit. If you need one of these devices for
whatever reasons, this one is not too bad but I can’t still recommend any of
these kinds of cameras if you want good clear crisp pictures. It will take up to
80 pictures at a time and will do short bursts of video as well. A little bigger
than some of these units but this one has quite a few features for its size. Maxtor
has come out with the perfect external storage unit for those big jobs that need
a lot of storage. At 80GB and with FireWire connectivity, this is the perfect
way to get you going with a fast 7200-RPM drive. At around $349 from
www.Maxtor.com Pocket
PC As
a Pocket PC User, I was certainly looking for the newest products to see what
was what in this arena and there was a lot of buzz around concerning these new
units. With the release of the Pocket PC 2002 operating system, Compaq, HP,
Casio, Audiovox, and Toshiba have all come out with new units and they are all
based on the Intel StrongARM 206mhz processor. What makes it even better is that
with all of them on the same platform, upgrades in the future will be easier
than ever. My old Casio E115 is based on the MIPS processor and so will not be
upgradeable to the new Pocket PC 2002 software so if you have an older unit, be
sure to check the upgradability before getting the new software. With more
memory, faster processors, and better color and better batteries, these are
definitely upgrade systems. I think with these new systems, you will also see a
ton of new applications coming out soon as well. Go to the Pocket web site at
www.pocketpc.com and see for yourself. Adobe
systems are now making available a PDF viewer for the Pocket PC on their web
site. Still listed as a beta version, it is a long overdue product as more and
more documents show up on the Pocket PC. At
the Microsoft Pocket PC event at Comdex, they were showing a number of wireless
applications and programs and in fact were giving away Socket, www.socketcom.com
wireless adapters for digital cell phones. Connect your Pocket PC to the digital
phone of your choice, and you can do email, web surfing, and connect to host
systems right from your Pocket PC. Course, the cost of that surfing will be
between you and your Internet and cell phone provider and will cost you at least
another $5 per month (at least from Sprint). They also include a number of
products for Bluetooth, traditional networks, communications, and traditional
land line modems for your Pocket PC. Another
neat Pocket PC product was from Conduits, www.conduits.com, who have come out
with a number of titles for the Pocket PC including Pocket Slides. You can drop
your PowerPoint presentations to your Pocket PC and use this program to view the
slide show, and if you connect it to a projection unit, can use it instead of a
laptop to give presentations. $39.95 Another neat tool of theirs is Pocket Watch
that turns your Pocket PC into a world time piece and a geo clock showing when
the sun rises and sets all over the world. $14.95. Pharos,
www.pharosgps.com, has come out with two new GPS (Global Positioning Satellite)
systems for the Pocket PC that looked very impressive. The iGPS-CF is a Compact
Flash card unit that connects directly into the CF slot on your Pocket PC to
allow you to use it as a stand-alone navigator and tracker whether you are on
foot, in a car, or boat. Available for $325. For a more versatile connection,
get the iGPS-180 receiver, about $249, that has a specific cable for either your
notebook, Pocket PC, Palm or Handspring, or even a USB version. Quick Review I
didn’t get to mention it last month but the new audio cards from Creative Labs
is really something to see and hear. John
Gasaway of Creative Labs was in town in October to show off the new line of
sound cards and they are really neat. Besides having true audio quality cards,
they have bundled some pretty good software as well to do things from cleaning
up audio tracks to time scaling to compress the length of a recording or sound
track but not change the pitch. Need to squeeze a 10-minute sound track into
nine minutes, this will do it, and did I mention Dolby Digital 5.1 support. One
of the cards includes fire wire to connect your video recorders and the like at
high speed. Depending on the card you get, it can have inputs and outputs for
audio, optical, analog, midi, SPDIF, and a remote RF port. What you now get is
studio quality audio on your PC with better than a 100 decibel signal to noise
ratio. Software tools will also clean up recordings from pops and scratches so
that when you copy those old tapes and records, you now will truly have a clear
digital sound track for your home made CDs. Priced from $99 on up, this is the
card to step up to. A First Look Let me introduce you
to the National Geode Origami Mobile Communicator. Before I tell you the size,
of course that just tipped you off, let me tell you what is included. It is a
digital camera, a digital camcorder, a video conferencing terminal, an Internet
access device for web surfing, an email terminal, an Internet picture frame, an
MP3 player, and a smart phone to begin with. It comes with a keyboard attached
(sort of), of course, built in microphone and speaker, 640x480 TFT LCD display
(4 inch in size), CF Storage slot, Microsoft Windows XP imbedded, with Windows
CE 4.0 coming early 2002, USB and Bluetooth. It is the shape of an oversized
clamshell type phone at 7.6 inches by 3.8 inches and is 1.3 inches deep. The
flexible form factor allows you to turn it different ways for different
applications. One way as a camera, one as an email terminal, and another to use
the phone. Did I mention the integrated touch screen support? Go look at www.cocom-ia.com; it is built as a partnership
between CoCom of the UK and National Semiconductor here in the states. Short Takes A lot of new
anti-virus software is coming on the market including Kaspersky from the former
Soviet Union. This one is at www.kaspersky.com and from the quick demo I saw,
looked pretty good. More later. USB (Universal Serial
Bus) has been with us for quite a while, since the Pentium I computers, but has
gotten a lot of bad press over bad drivers, hardware, and incompatible interface
designs. It has finally stabilized a bit now that we are on the four generation
away from that original Pentium and what I did see was a bunch of USB 2.0
products coming out from film scanners to hard drives, to a new CD Writer from
Plextor. Many of these devices seem to be backward compatible with the older USB
standards but what doesn’t look like it will happen is to have any kind of
upgrade path to the millions of older computers out there. It sure is hard to
think of a Pentium 4 as being an older computer but that is the way it is with
technology. So, what was fun
about Comdex this year? Well, Mercedes Benz had a road track laid out in one of
the parking lots to allow us to take their cars for a literal spin around the
block and I must say that the S600 was fun to drive. 2C Computing got me around
the hassle of not taking a bag onto the show floor by giving us a rolling piece
of luggage to carry stuff home in, and of course, the Palm powered Pepsi machine
that I could phone for a soft drink. Big
name entertainment was missing and the parties were smaller than before but
Compaq treated us to a performance by “Better than Ezra”, who ever they are.
At least the bar was open.
January 2002
So what will be new and exciting this year? For one
thing, Microsoft’s Xbox is impressive. Just ask any kid (of any age) who has
played with one recently to tell you that the graphics, motion, sound, all are
truly impressive. I am not a game player and the last time I watched a
friend’s child play with an old Nintendo, was not excited by what I saw on the
screen. Flat graphics, choppy motion, sound from an old AM radio speaker, and a
dull game to boot but what a difference a generation makes. If you have kids
that are into games, by the time you read this I suspect many of you will have
already bought one. Well,
Happy New Year. we are certainly looking forward to it to finish out a
rather difficult year.
Robert Sanborn is an
Independent Personal Computer Consultant, and the Program Chairman for the
Indianapolis Computer Society. Reach him through the net at
robert@sanbornsoftware.com |
|
Copyright © 1999 - 2012
PC Lifeline
|