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Comdex 2001 Coverage With a Handheld Twist

Posted by michael on from the no-body-cavity-searches dept.

Phillip M. Torrone writes: "Gosh folks, a thousand words couldn't describe how great Comdex 2001 was this year for me. But, about 300 pictures may help. Your pal pt from flashenabled.com/mobile has it all. Memory stick and SD GPS units, Cameras, Microwaves and Bluetooth; The new Sharp Linux PDA with keyboard; Bluetooth everything, Pocket PCs, Sony robot dogs, Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones, Windows XP, Xbox, Merecedes Benz test drives, Klingons, the Strip, virtual keyboards, DoCoMo, Harry Potter and more. The coverage is almost as good as being there."

7 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Almost as good... by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 3, Interesting
    "The coverage is almost as good as being there."

    Correction: The coverage is almost as good as being there assuming you have broadband to d/l the 300+ photos.

    Otherwise, the coverage is as good as being there but being forced to move around the convention floor in a powered wheelchain that has a 0.3 m/s speed limit. Sigh. Hopefully they're showing something that can extend wireless broadband reliably to where they'd never set up DSL or fiber. Does anyone with broadband see anything like this?

    1. Re:Almost as good... by gUmbi · · Score: 5, Funny

      Cry me a river. I'm download the images on a 75bps acoustic coupler modem, converting them to ASCII-ART, printing them on a ribbonless 9-pin Epson and deciphering the braille-like images with my fingertips.

  2. Stinky feet. by VA+Software · · Score: 3, Offtopic

    Please explain this picture

    Thank you.

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  3. The Comdex URL by acrhemeied · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Comdex page is here. The URL in the article points to a mobile Flash-worshipping site (which does indeed link to the Comdex bit (but is covered in images as well)).

  4. MS booth by zephc · · Score: 4, Funny

    and heres a great pic from the Microsoft area at COMDEX ;-)

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  5. Re:Samsung Virtual Wireless Keyboard by Brento · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's even cooler than you think. Forget about using it with your desktop: think PDA, cell phone, and laptop.

    For those of you who didn't click on the link, Samsung has a virtual wireless keyboard that just straps rings on your fingers, links the rings back to a control device on your wrist, and then operates over Bluetooth, so you don't actually have a keyboard - let alone wires.

    IMHO, the biggest problem with packaging laptops is the keyboard. Take that away, and suddenly the tablet-style look makes a lot of sense. Give me just a screen, no drives, and this virtual wireless keyboard. I can just see using that in coach class on airplanes, which is just about impossible now with conventional full-size laptops. By the time you fold it open, the guy in front of you has already leaned back, and there's no room for the laptop. With this, I could just put the screen on my lap and type away.

    I'd like to see how they handled the security risks, though. I can just see three guys sitting next to each other with these things, and all of their laptops getting all of their keystrokes correctly, without accepting keystrokes from the other. You'd want the security on both ends: you sure don't want another device intercepting every keystroke (hello, passwords!) and you don't want to accidentally send a bunch of keystrokes to your cell phone or PDA or laptop.

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  6. A few cool things at Comdex by infiniti99 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Nokia's 9290 phone/PDA thing is soooo cool. I got to look at it at E3 earlier this year, but only at Comdex did I see it doing some actual operation. They had one playing a realvideo stream, and some others running games. This one lady had a digicam watch and she took a picture of me, then pointed the watch at the 9290 and beamed my image across. Then she displayed it on the screen and proceeded to say how she could now email it off if she wanted. Freaky!

    The next cool device was the new Sharp SL-5000D PDA, running Qt/Palmtop. I saw it at Trolltech's booth. It has this fold-out keyboard thing, which is surprisingly usable. If it has a built in GSM modem, it would be a serious contender to the Nokia 9290. For me, the only reason I would choose the Sharp would be ease of programming. Instead of having to learn EPOC programming (for the Nokia) I could just use Qt.

    Speaking of "just use Qt", Trolltech even had an iBook at the booth running Qt/Mac on it. Call me crazy, but I began to hack on the laptop right there for about 20 or 30 minutes. I was able to create a couple useless testing programs. Worked as advertised! Even the pulsating default buttons. This was only the second time I've laid hands on a machine running MacOS X, and I was already able to program applications for it. Hmm, maybe it will be a tough call between the Nokia and Sharp.

    A few other minor things caught my eye, but these were the big ones. Overall, it wasn't as interesting as this year's E3 (which wasn't very interesting either actually). Funny thing: ATI was showing off GameCubes (I guess they make the video chipset?), and Microsoft and Sony had XBox and PS2 there as well. Perhaps they wanted it to be E3 :)