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Comdex 2001 Coverage With a Handheld Twist
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."
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.
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)).
and heres a great pic from the Microsoft area at COMDEX ;-)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
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.
What's your damage, Heather?