Assorted CES Gizmos

Frank Buckheimer writes "The CES 2003 show in Las Vegas will give us some pretty nice introductions of some brand new products." Other submitters sent in news about a "Mini PC" the size of a paperback book, and a spiffy digital sound projector. mbstone writes "Bill Gates announced a line of MS wristwatches that receive email, stock quotes, sports scores, etc. by FM radio. Gates claims it's a 'whole new product concept that was completely incubated by Microsoft Research,' but it's really just a reprise of the Seiko MessageWatch -- mine became just a watch, sans atomic time, as of 12/31/99 when Seiko called it quits. Once bitten, twice shy. Has anybody proposed an open standard for such gadgets so that new wristwatch-data-service providers can enter the market when the old provider leaves?"

Comments

Digital Sound Projector

[nattt]

Although the article says that the sound projector sounds great, I severely doubt it.....

Each of the 254 little speakers works off a helix of plastic that expands or contracts on an electrical signal. Because the speakers are small, they do not do bass frequencies - which means you'd need a seperate bass speaker, and for home cinema, a subwoofer also, or some combined bass / subwoofer device.

The original idea of 1ltd for the digital speaker didn't include 5.1 channel support. It was just going to be a digital hi-fi speaker, but now they're using extra computer processing to send beams of sound which you're supposed to bounce off the walls of the room to make it sound like there's speaker behind you. This is a recipe for disaster because bounced sound sounds bad, and not all rooms have walls suitable for bouncing sound. And rooms with walls that are suitable, will actually sound bad, beacause of the resonances bouncy rooms set up.

This technology will fail.

Re:Digital Sound Projector

[nattt]

They don't act as a phased array. The phase is deliberately played with to direct the sound around the room. Anyway, we're talking very small speakers with hardly any throw at all, and even the company themselves admit it doesn't do bass frequencies.

Bose is all hype. Bouncing sound around a room is not a good thing. The bounce off the walls colours the sound as walls don't bounce all frequencies equally. The Bose direct/reflect philosophy has been prooved wrong time and again because adding extra room sound into recorded music adds in extra room sound that was never in the recording to begin with. Speakers should intereact with the room as little as possible if you want to hear what was recorded. That's why decent headphones sound so good (lack of crossover and low power requirements help too).

And the technology will fail. The poster below pointing out about how 1 ltd is VP funded and has never in the past 5 or so years I've been reading about them produced a commercial product says all that really needs to be said about them.

NXT who developed their distrubute node loudspeaker (doesn't do any bass worth speaking of either) is at least a commercial product with good applications.

CES Wrap-up on TechNews.com

[rhwalker22]

TechNews.com's Cynthia L. Webb surveys the media coverage of CES in her daily column today.

Market for these Devices?

[webword]

I'm very skeptical of these kinds of devices. For example, how many people really want stock quotes on their watches? Is there real value in that? How is a stock ticker on a watch significantly better than a stock ticker on a PDA or cell phone? Also, beyond the cool factor, how important is atomic time to Joe Sixpack? Let's face it, if it isn't significantly better, then only technogeeks will care about it. It'll die a quick death. But wait, there's more. The other factor is this. Even if the product is significantly better in terms of functionality, if the usability sucks then uptake of the product in the market could be minimal. IMHO there are many strikes against these products becoming mainstream products any time soon.

1. More on usability: webword.com (Disclaimer: This is one of my web sites.)

2. Bell Labs Reports on Progress Towards "Dick Tracy" Watch

3. Check Out a Watch Dick Tracy Would Envy

4. IBM stuffs Linux into "Dick Tracy's watch"

5. A User Interface Toolkit for a Small Screen Device

6. Is Timing Ripe for Wrist PDAs?

Absolutely right

[HEbGb]

You are correct.

While it is possible to create reasonable amounts of bass using a sufficient number of small transducers, the 'real' advantage of big woofers is generally their long throw. A good woofer can have a clean displacement of several millimeters, while these small transducers cannot, without causing extreme distortion.

[The transducers don't use the helix method, as far as I can tell. They look like the same ones used in consumer audio systems by Harman and Creative Labs. The helix stuff is a different technology they're hyping.]

As for all of the 'beaming' claims, it's a load of nonsense. There may be vague lateral effects possible with this, but a phased array has to be much, much larger than the wavelengths its generating to create any substantial beam steering. Quite telling is that there isn't a shread of data available anywhere on their website or published reports.

Traditional "3D Audio" systems are a much better bet - far cheaper, and I'll bet they work as well as this (which isn't saying much).

1Limited is a VC backed company, and do not have any reasonable prospect of becoming profitable. Thus, they have to rely on hype to convince investors to keep propping them up.

802.11a Leaves me Cold, compared to apple Macworld

[goombah99]

Does anyone else find these offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?

Bill gates announces a recylced idea for a Nerd watch that shows sport scores, headlines. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.

The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to go with 802.11a and not 802.11g
I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.

How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.

Comparison to Timex pager-watch

[uigrad_2000]

If I understand the concept correctly, these watches are only receiving data, not sending.

It's hard to say. The news clip doesn't say much.

My watch (see it here) can send and receive pages, although typing on it involves a whole lot of keystrokes(!).

I know I'm bordering on almost an ad here, but I think the watch is really a great deal. $50, includes one year of skytel service, and a voicemail box.

Once you get it, go to mobile.yahoo.com, and click on the alerts tab. It's pretty easy to customize it for weather, stock, news, and sports alerts. I normally don't like dinner interruptions, but 15 seconds to read the Illini score at half-time is well worth it. I suppose there are non-entertainment purposes for the pager too, but I haven't used them yet!

If you're a bargain shopper, you might want to wait. The regular price on these has been as low as $40 before, and I got mine for $32.50 using a coupon code (which is now expired). Watch your favorite bargain hunting page for new coupon codes.

Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt

[SerpentMage]

In Europe it is called RDS. Every (or almost every) car radio can pick up RDS. RDS is a one way digital broadcasting system used to disseminate information about traffic jams, and other news. Now some radio stations are using it to broadcast the name of the song that is currently playing.

Is it clever? Absolutely. Is it original? The only trick now is to get FM stations to broadcast more content.