Wireless Web Wows PC Expo Crowd.

In-home applications abound

For some unknown reason, the trade show formerly known as "PC Expo" has suddenly become "PC Xpo." At a time when every company on earth is adding the letter "e" to its business plan, this subtraction seems odd. But perhaps that's fitting, since PC Expo itself has become an oddity: a PC floor show where PCs are preliminary used only to demonstrate the new devices that connect to them. Still, the "PC" moniker effectively limits the number of flash-in-the-pan dot-coins at the show, and makes it a showcase for companies with real, honest-to-goodness products--albeit many in prototype form. Below, we discuss some of the more interesting technologies in evidence at Javits.

Wherefore Art Thou, Bluetooth?

Harald Bluetooth was a Danish king who unified Denmark and Norway in the 10th century. We've begun to wonder if there's something rotten in Denmark. We first discussed Bluetooth in late 1998. We then examined it closely early in 1999, after its first exclusive trade show. At that time, we expected to see products in early January of this year. In fact, even today few Bluetooth-enabled products are available. But Toshiba showed me prototypes of both add-on Bluetooth PC Cards and on-the-motherboard chipsets, as well as a Nokia mobile phone with Bluetooth installed.

This technology has real promise. With an effective networking range of thirty feet and no line-of-sight requirements (Bluetooth operates in the 2.4GHz radio band), the technology allows devices to communicate seamlessly, with no set-up. I saw a notebook PC with a Bluetooth PC Card (from Motorola, expected to retail for $150-$200) communicate with a cell phone and use the cell phone to connect to and surf the Internet--at a painfully slow 30Kbps, but beggars can't be choosers. Toshiba also demonstrated notebooks with built-in Bluetooth communicating with a Bluetooth-enabled projector; the presentation was beamed to the notebooks as it was displayed on the wall.

While applications like this one may fill a niche somewhere, the real potential for Bluetooth, in my mind, is in its ability to allow the various devices floating around a home to communicate: digital camera, PDA, cell phone, and printer. The point of this technology is to remove the PC from the equation, giving other devices the intelligence normally associated with a computer. In effect, devices would have built-in networking capability (at only 1Mbps, but this will improve), making wiring a home or adding unwieldy or impractical wireless networking cards a thing of the past. If it works, and it's inexpensive enough, it could be revolutionary. Expect add-in cards to appear in Q3 and Q4 and Bluetooth-on-the-motherboard in Q1 2001. We hope.

The Palm OS Franchise

Palm Computing--which had a huge presence at the show--announced that the next version of Palm will include built-in expansion capability via Secure Digital Media. This new expansion slot for the Palm line differs in type from that used in its main competitor, the Handspring Visor, which uses a proprietary Springboard slot. I played with both devices, fooled around with a PocketPC, and viewed--through glass, because it was a non-working prototype--Sony's forthcoming entry into the Palm--compatible market, expected in Q4.

Admittedly, the Sony device looked cool: a cross between the Palm V's metal sheath (though thinner) and a color PocketPC. It will use Sony's MemoryStick technology in some way; will be PalmOS compatible; and may have some form of wireless Web access. It also uses Sony's Jog dial, which is a small, side-mounted dial that can be both turned and pushed to scroll through and select menu items. I have used the Jog dial on a 900MHz Sony cordless phone and it works great using one hand. But with only a nonworking model available in late June, getting thousands of units on store shelves by the fall seems a stretch.

Sony also surprised the digital camera industry with a new CD-R based unit, the Mavica MVC-CD1000. The new camera uses a 156MB, 3.5-inch CD-R drive; each CD-R disc (about $4) can hold 160 1600 x 1200 (2.1 megapixel) images. A new high-quality MPEG mode (MPEG HQ) allows for full frame, full screen MPEG playback on a standard TV at 16 frames per second. The camera, scheduled to ship by the time you read this, includes five blank CD-Rs and is expected to retail for about $1,300. Be advised: the unit is quite large. (We're still waiting to see a CD-RW unit. Maybe next year.)

At the Handspring Visor booth, company officials were demonstrating soon-to-be-delivered add-on modules in the form of digital cameras, voice recorders, and of course modems. Perhaps feeling the pinch from Handspring, at the show Palm demonstrated the Palm Mobile Internet Kit, which will be under $50 and available worldwide in Q3 or Q4. The Kit allows Palm users to connect their Palms (III and later) to a mobile phone via infrared or a cable. The Kit will provide access to Internet sites that use the Palm Clipping service, as well as email (via ActualSoft's MultiMail and built-in clients for Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail) and messaging, via SMS.

While Palm's move is commendable, it is quite clearly a stopgap measure, meant to keep users from switching to (or adopting) the Visor while Palm gets its Web access act together. Palm officials also announced that next year's Palms will expand via CompactFlash. Two new models, which should be shipping by the time you read this, will not include the CF slot.

In a recent television interview with Charlie Rose, Jeff Hawkins, Palm founder and now head of Handspring, made an important point about PDAs. He said that users do not want to use a mobile phone to connect to the Internet: they want to use their Internet-enabled PDA to make phone calls. I believe he is correct.

Today, mobile phone makers are struggling with the difficulties of display, processing, and power requirements that are part of the Web-browsing experience. PDA makers, on the other hand, have much more experience dealing with these obstacles, and it's much easier to add voice to a PDA than to add Internet surfing capability to a mobile phone. You can bet that both Palm and Handspring are hard at work figuring out how to make their devices voice-ready.

The PocketPCs that I played with at the show, while exhibiting impressive color displays, are too heavy and too bulky to appeal to anyone used to the light weight, powerful Palm/Visor devices. PocketPCs will continue to sell, of course, but will continue to be specialized devices and will not replace the Palm until weight and battery life improve.

Clik!+MP3

And, speaking of specialized devices, removable storage maven Iomega is branching out. The company announced several forthcoming MP3 media players using Clik! technology, including one branded by Iomega and developed in conjunction with Sensory Science. The players allow users to add Clik! removable media when they want to change the songs stored in their devices and are away from their PCs. "One of the barriers to MP3 players becoming more widely accepted [has] been the high cost of removable flash storage, with 32MB cards priced at approximately $100," says Iomega's Mike Lucas. "Clik! technology offers consumers a more affordable removable storage solution with 40MB disks priced as low as $9.99 each." What I really like about this device is that it does not require the user to have a Clik! drive attached to a PC: the unit itself serves this purpose, via a USB cable. Hence, it can be used for storage as well as music, a nice touch.

IBM also announced a stunning technical achievement in removable storage: Big Blue has tripled the capacity of its matchbook-size Microdrive, to a once-unthinkable 1GB on a platter the size of a quarter. The drive, scheduled to ship to OEMs at about the time you read this, can hold up to 1,000 high-resolution photographs or nearly 18 hours of digital audio. (340MB and 512MB versions are also available.) Though relatively expensive by magnetic storage standards--$500 retail, or $.50/MB--on a cost-per-megabyte basis the drive quite simply crushes its Flash RAM competition. Excessive power consumption, an issue with the first drive, was addressed in the new drive, according to IBM officials. Sustained data rate has been improved, so the drive draws less power from the host device, thus extending battery life.

Perhaps most important, the newest Microdrive offers unprecedented expandability for any handheld device that accepts Type II Compact Flash, particularly PDAs, cameras, and portable music players. While its high price makes it difficult to cost-effectively add the Microdrive to these devices today, this will certainly change over the next 12-18 months. The drive can also be paired with a Type II PC Card for use in notebook PCs, though with rewritable optical drives now available in portables it may be hard to justify the Microdrive's cost premium.

IBM also announced availability of its WebSphere Voice Server, which includes ViaVoice and allows delivery of voice applications based on VoiceXML. The company also introduced ViaVoice for Linux. Cahners-Instat projects that the voice technology market will reach $120 billion worldwide by 2006, and IBM is clearly well positioned in this market. The company has added ViaVoice to its DirectTalk call center platform, and is also now shipping DirectTalk Beans for Java.

Yet More Optical Standards

Companies showing the latest and greatest removable optical media always have a presence at PC Expo, and this year was no exception. DVD-RAM disc capacities have been raised to 4.7GB, making storage equivalent to DVD-ROM media. The DVD Forum demonstrated the latest rewritable DVD devices, including DVD video cameras and DVD-Audio players, and once again promised that we would see DVD-RAM drives in systems from major OEMs, this time in Q3 or Q4 of this year. If this sounds like a broken record (or, more appropriately, a skipping disc) that's because we heard the same promises last year This year's big push is DVD format compatibility, and the media briefing included a presentation on the new "DVD Multi" plan. This strategy hopes to unify all the various DVD formats by setting hardware specifications to "realize disc compatibility for virtually all formats created by the DVD Forum, both for consumer electronics and personal computers."

What this means is that new devices, be they for PCs or home entertainment, will be able to read all flavors of DVD, including: DVD-V, DVD-ROM, DVD-A, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-VR (Video Recording). All drives will read CD media. DVD Multi products are expected in early 2001.