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Cybiko Breaks Out. With a big marketing push for round-the-clock demos and droves of peripherals, the peer-to-peer wireless device aimed at the teen and tween market wants to be in every school backpack this year. |
Somewhere in the middle of the Las Vegas Convention Center, I am standing in an artificially created home of the future, Microsoft's demonstration home to showcase technologies that will automate and monitor the household. I'm in the kitchen, watching an actress in her 60s pretend to IM with a friend down the street while she bakes cookies. She is explaining to us that with Microsoft's new home system, if someone leaves the refrigerator door open, the system will automatically e-mail and IM anyone in the household who is online repeatedly with that message, until someone comes and closes it. A status menu on a monitor shows who in the home is "Here" and who is "Away." I wonder if maybe the residents have barcodes on the backs of their necks that the front doorjamb scans. The slogan under Microsoft's logo says the home systems will "Simplify Your Life."
Like hell.
They may make it more interesting, more cool, more wired, more connected, more capable, more efficient. But there's no way on earth that the systems being proposed can claim to simplify our life. Imagine the setup alone? The maintenance? The updates? Want simplicity? Try basic cable and an iMac.
For the rest of us, Microsoft's home and the rest of the Consumer Electronics Show was a peek at what the folks in the consumer electronics industry are working on to sell us over the next year. And never fear, we'll buy them. Just don't tell us they will simplify our lives. Don't pee on our legs and tell us it's raining. These things we buy out of passion and interest -- every peripheral that plugs into the back of the box -- becomes a maintenance burden and one more object to feed batteries into. Don't get me wrong: I'll be buying them, too. But I won't be kidding myself about the bottom line effect on the simplicity of my life.
Here's a quick rundown on three keynotes at CES, then a checklist of five highly visible trends at the show.
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Intel's Wireless Browsing Pad was one of several working demos of the product niche. Intel promises it by summer. |
It's the hardware that powers these innovations in consumer electronics. At least that's what Intel CEO Craig Barrett told the audience in his Friday night keynote. The Blue Man Group, popularized in commercials for the Pentium III (and performing nightly just down the Strip at the Luxor), opened for Barrett -- a tough act for anyone to follow. Harder still for a CEO who refers to marketing reps in their 30s as "youngsters" and picks on them before an audience of 3,000. Think of your PC as the center of a solar system of peripherals, Barrett told us. Everything in that system spins more easily when a Pentium 4 chip powers the center.
Good metaphor, said Bill Gates, who took the stage the following morning. But it's good software that really makes the difference. Gates demoed a preview of Whistler, the personal operating system that will evolve out of Windows 2000 into a multiuser OS for the home (log on and pick up where you left off, regardless of who else has been on since) and, with the help of The Rock, introduced the X-Box. The box itself is an unimpressive black rectangle, but the previews of games looked just about like Toy Story in real time.
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3Com's Audrey is a fashion-conscious kitchen device, with a touch-sensitive screen, aimed primarily at browsing and e-mail. It also synchs with two Palms and has a third calendar in it, giving you views of three schedules together. The small keyboard hangs in the back when not in use. |
Powerful hardware and sophisticated software don't get you too far into the consumer market unless you have good design, countered Carl Yankowski, Palm's CEO who arrived onstage Saturday afternoon in a blue 1975 Super Beetle that he called a design classic. Yankowski told us it was his own, bought new and lovingly maintained since then. Only a design classic could inspire such devotion, something like the Palm V. Yankowski has polished his presentation since the PocketPC-powered iPaq arrived on the scene last summer, and he once again warned of the dangers of trying to stuff a PC into the pocket, reminding us that the batteries last longer if you only use your PDA for PIM functions.
MP3 players. Ubiquitous. Must have been a thousand there. Samsung has a line of about 20 branded as Yepp, and they weren't even showing their Uproar, which is a mobile phone with an MP3 player integrated. Creative Labs probably leads the pack with its Nomad II and now Jukebox, a package about the size of a portable CD player that houses a 6-gigabyte drive for 100 hours of storage. Drawback: batteries only last two hours.
Personal TV Recorders. The revolution inspired by TiVo and Replay is spreading. Microsoft was showing off its Ultimate TV in two pavilions. Records everything you want to watch, pauses broadcast, then resumes play out of buffer, records shows whenever they appear.This will be the home entertainment console everyone will buy after their DVD player is boring but before they can afford a flat-screen TV.
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Net Radio Breaks Out on its Own. 3Com's Kerbango is a dedicated device for listening to streaming radio stations over a broadband connection. Tuning knobs and keys aim to simulate the ease of an "ol' time radio." Output is only 2 watts, so pick up a pair of good external speakers when you get one. |
Web appliances. 3Com's Audrey is out on the market and has a striking retro design. The browser/e-mail/calendaring appliance comes in five kitcheny colors, including avocado and sunflower, to match your refrigerator. Synchs with Mom's and Dad's Palm calendar, so everyone knows where everyone is. Voice recorder, preset channels, small keyboard that hangs out of site in the back all make it appear very well thought-out. Sells for abour $549. Others, including Intel, were showing wireless browser pads aimed at the 40 million North Americans that Dataquest says are now "telewebbing" (browsing while watching TV). But most of these were looking to later this year before they hit retail.
Wireless PDAs. Visor skipped the show (except for an expensive billboard across the street from the Convention Center), but Palm was synching show programs at the front door. Cybiko had a central presence and showed a whole line of appliances. It says it's wiring malls across America with base stations, to make it easier for the teens and tweens they target to play multiuser games in a black-and-white environment while walking from Orange Julius to Old Navy.
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Hitachi's Micro Monitor projects a high-resolution image of a screen on your retina and looks like a 13-inch monitor floating in space two feet in front of you. Well, sort of. Once you can pull it into focus. The remote in his hand acts as a mouse with two buttons and a track pad on it. |
Home Gateways and Wireless Networks. The natural downstream marketing opportunity from high-bandwidth into the home is the home router/gateway/firewall to make it easier to take that bandwidth to more than one machine. 3Com, Intel and many others were showing these gateways. An ISP called Telocity gives them away as a draw for its DSL service. Intel was also pitching its Anypoint wireless home networking product, which works on neither Bluetooth nor the industrial-strenght IEEE 802.11, but on Home RF. Others were showing networking through the power grid in the home.
And before I buy too wholeheartedly into the vision of the Smart Home of the Future, I must admit that I thought some of the displays suffered from Tomorrowland Disease, an unnatural condition where corporations make outlandish promises to us about futures that will never come true. At moments, I felt like I was in Epcot watching old black-and-white footage of Mom and Dad drinking cocktails on the couch of their flying car which was whizzing them to a friend's home, circa 1963. Some things, no matter how cool they look, just ain't meant to be.
David Sims was the editorial director of the O'Reilly Network.
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