 | December 1, 2000 |
Comdex swerves
ANALYSIS: Portable and wireless devices dominate confab
It's a good thing that most people don't remember that Comdex is an acronym for "Computer Dealers Exposition," because the latest edition held a few weeks back in Las Vegas had a decidedly non-PC flavor. Indeed, mobile devices, Internet appliances, multimedia appliances, and wireless connectivity took center stage.
The rhetoric started early as Microsoft once again publicly tried to wrest the handheld market from Palm-based purveyors. Granted, the newest Pocket PCs from companies like Compaq and Hewlett-Packard are compelling. Microsoft continues to use phrases like "no compromise" to describe Pocket PCs, while offering Palm backhanded kudos on its device simplicity. Unfortunately, the Pocket PCs are severely compromised in terms of battery life, which will lead me to stick with my Palm for now. If I were to make a change, it would likely be to an even smaller device like Xircom's new REX 6000, which now sports a stylus for input, or to a cell phone with PDA functions.
At Comdex, the Palm and Microsoft camps both brought multimedia into the PDA world, albeit in different ways. Microsoft demonstrated a version of Windows Media Player running on a Pocket PC. Palm and Shinei International, meanwhile, announced an add-on MIDI audio device for Palm V PDAs, and Palm hinted about an upcoming add-on MP3 player.
Regardless of your chosen PDA or appliance, you can most likely connect it any time or place given the whirlwind of wireless announcements from Comdex. Palm is delivering on its long-promised $39.95 Mobile Internet Kit, which works with all Palm PDAs. However, the kit requires a cell phone as the communication link and relies not on a true microbrowser but rather a clipping service.
Pocket PC users may have an advantage in wireless connectivity. Metricom, purveyor of wireless Internet services, and OmniSky, operator of a wireless CDPD (cellular digital packet data) data service, are partnering to offer wireless Internet on Pocket PCs using Metricom's growing Ricochet network. Sierra Wireless builds the wireless modems used with Ricochet and offers versions for PDAs like Compaq's iPAQ.
Ricochet, however, isn't just for PDAs. National Semiconductor and Metricom teamed up to demonstrate a Ricochet-connected WebPAD Internet appliance based on the former's Geode processor. You might note that Geode is doing quite well in the appliance market, scoring recent design wins with Compaq and 3Com. Of course the biggest Internet appliance news at Comdex came via the Gateway device based on a Transmeta processor, although it says here that the tie to AOL will hamper that effort.
Not all of the non-PC announcements at Comdex related to mobile devices or appliances; some focused on the digital den. Dauphin Technology, for example, showed a broadband-equipped set-top box (STB) family dubbed OraLynx. The products support Web access, video on demand, and remote access to the STB from around the house or around the world. A high-end version supports xDSL, fiber, and cable interfaces and can host applications such as voice over data and videoconferencing.
National Semiconductor's Geode processor also scored in the STB arena. Swedish player i3 micro technology has integrated the Geode into an STB called Mood that, in addition to typical Web features, supports gaming on demand, MP3 audio playback, and live chat.
You might think you'd have to wait until next month's Consumer Electronics Show to look at the latest output devices for advanced STBs, but Hitachi showed up at Comdex with two PC-ready HDTV sets. In rear-projection and DLP (digital light processing) flavors, the TVs feature 16:9 aspect ratios and handle full 1080i HDTV resolution. Hitachi also renewed its pledge to ship a digital camcorder based on DVD-RAM and a consumer DVD-RAM recorder early next year.
Even Comdex's PC-centric announcements had a convergence slant. For example, Compaq and Xerox combined to demonstrate Bluetooth as a way to connect PC and printer. Finally, Intel entered the market for PC input devices in a wireless way. The company demonstrated a wireless base station that can link wireless game pads, keyboards, pointing devices and other peripherals to a PC. Or are they perhaps better suited to link to an interactive digital TV?
—Maury Wright
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