What: Samsung 80-inch Plasma Display Panel (PDP)
You can never be too rich, too thin, or too...huge. That pretty much sums up the deal on plasma and LCD flat-panel monitors. There is considerable debate about which technology offers the better viewing experience (I'm partial to LCDs) but when it comes to largeness, plasma seems to be winning. Currently Samsung offers a 63-inch high-definition plasma TV for $17,999 (which, believe it or not, is a bargain, the price on 42-inch plasmas used to start at $15,000), while Sharp will begin selling the world's largest high-def LCD screen this summer at 45 inches diagonally (no price was set at press time). But the topper was this prototype Samsung 80-inch (that's over 6.5 feet) plasma HDTV that the company built to show off at this year's trade shows.
What: Creative Zen Portable Media Center (left); Samsung Yepp YH-999 Portable Media Center (right)
So you take an iPod, and you slap a video screen on it, and you give it the ability to compress, store, and playback movies, and what have you got? You've got the tech industry's newest portable entertainment dream machine. Last year, French electronics manufacturer Archos launched the first of these hard-drive-based devices, the AV300, which weighs less than a pound and starts at $499 for a 20-gig drive, but is not the simplest thing in the world to use. Archos has plans to release an even smaller, lighter version soon. Now Microsoft has thrown its considerable weight into the arena, creating a special user-friendly operating system for these machines and tailoring it to work best with the next generation of Windows Media Player (surprise, surprise!). Two of the first Portable Media Center (PMC) machines to hit the market will be Creative's Zen and the Samsung Yepp YH-999 (both pictured here). Expect each to hold about 87 hours of video, over 300 hours of music, or 50,000 pictures for every 20 gigs of drive space.
What: Toshiba HD-DVD recorder (left); Pioneer Blu-ray recorder (right)
After years of hype, High-Definition TVs are beginning to take off as variety surges and prices fall. There is, however, one thing keeping them from reaching their true potential. There is, as yet, no way to go down to the store and buy or rent an HD movie on disc and play it on your set. Naturally, instead of working together towards a single solution, the electronics industry has decided to start a format war. On one side is Blu-ray, developed by Sony and backed by a string of companies such as Pioneer, Philips, Sharp, LG, and TDK. On the other side is HD-DVD, developed in tandem by Toshiba and NEC. Both types of disc will be available in recordable and read-only formats, and will be supported by both recorders and players--in short, they will be a lot like DVDs, only more so.
So why the two formats? Oddly, it has little to do with quality (both are around the same) and everything to do with backwards compatibility and capacity. Both formats use blue lasers (CD and DVD players use red lasers), which allow engineers to squeeze more data on the discs. Because of the way Blu-ray discs are constructed, they can hold up to 54 gigabytes per disc, compared to HD-DVD's maximum of 32 gigs. But that same construction also makes it unclear if Blu-ray machines will be able to play old-fashioned DVDs. Prototype machines such as those shown here from Toshiba and Pioneer have been circulating around electronics shows, and Sony is selling the first Blu-ray recorder in Japan for $2,700 (discs sell for about $23). So which one should you buy? I say neither. Let them fight it out for a while until a winner emerges.
What: Sony X505
Laptops are one of the great miniaturization marvels of the computer age. Their form-factor is, to an extent, limited by the need for a reasonable screen and a keyboard that doesn't require toothpicks to type on, so to become ever-more portable, they must become thinner and lighter. I honestly thought that they had gotten as small as they were ever going to get when Toshiba introduced its Portégé R100 at 2.4 pounds and .7 inches thick. But Sony has just introduced the X505 in Japan, a computer that is rice-paper thin (.34 inches) and the lightest in the world at only 1.7 pounds. Encased in carbon fiber for strength, it manages to squeeze in a 20-gigabyte hard drive and a 1-gighertz Intel Centrino processor. Sony has just announced that a 1.8-pound version with a carbon-nickel (there are, apparently, restrictions on the importation of carbon fiber, but this will still be the lightest in America) case will hit our shores in late June, but all those superlatives won't come cheap.
What: WiMAX
It's not really a gadget, per se, and it's hard to imagine early adopters getting all frothed up over something as sterile as a wireless network, but WiMAX (a.k.a. 802.16) is one of those rare technologies that really has the potential to fundamentally change the way we communicate. Like the current 802.11 Wi-Fi standards, WiMAX facilitates wireless connections at broadband speeds. Unlike Wi-Fi, WiMAX isn't limited to a 300-foot radius from the base station antenna. WiMAX can establish high-speed connections at distances of up to 30 miles, meaning that a few antennas could blanket a metropolitan area. Initially, WiMAX is expected to work as an alternative to cable and DSL broadband, with fixed antennas picking up distant signals. Shortly thereafter, however, we should see affordable WiMAX cards for laptops, enabling you to take your broadband connection with you almost anywhere.
What: NEC LaVie laptop
It's a bizarre concept, but the more you think about it, the more useful it seems. A British company called NXT has invented a type of screen that also acts as a speaker. They call it SoundVu, and the first company to use the technology is NEC (apparently, this technology can only be used by three-letter companies), which has integrated it into several desktop computers sold in Japan, including the new-to-market LaVie laptop shown here. The screen can provide center, right, and left channel sound, and, since the speakers take up no extra room in the laptop housing, NEC can use that space for other things--like, say, a larger screen. Although this computer might never make it to our shores, expect to see SoundVu technology find wide application in cell phones, where manufacturers are dying to make bigger screens on smaller and smaller handsets.
What: Kyocera Koi (left); Samsung SPH-V4400 (right)
The cameras in cell phones have long lagged behind standalone digital cameras in resolution and picture quality, producing tiny, grainy images that are only good for viewing on tiny, grainy cell phone screens. But as more and more people are embracing cell phone photography as more than a mere novelty, and as faster, higher-bandwidth third-generation (3G) networks are evolving that can carry high-resolution images, camera phones are beginning to get powerful. How powerful? Well, the upcoming Kyocera Koi will be one of the first megapixel phones for the U.S. market, taking 1.2 megapixel photos (pretty tame by digicam standards, but good enough for a crisp 4 x 6 print), and can take short video clips, too. But Samsung has been showing off its 2-megapixel beauty with an integrated flash (rare in cell phones because it eats up battery life), that takes pictures that rival many digital cameras, and can also record up to two hours of video.
What: Nokia 9500 Communicator
Several telecommunications and wireless technology trends are about to collide, and the point of impact will be your cell phone. Not necessarily your current cell phone, but companies such as Samsung, LG, and Nokia are set to release phones later this year that can tap into 3G cellular networks as well as 802.11 Wi-Fi local area networks. That means that, when you're chatting at home or at work in the office, you can tap into your Wi-Fi network to download data or even make Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone calls, thereby saving yourself cellular airtime usage, without sacrificing mobility while on the road. The Nokia 9500 Communicator here not only does Wi-Fi and cellular, it also is Bluetooth enabled, and can unfold into PDA with a mini-keyboard. Alas, it is being launched in Europe, and no one will say when it will make it to our shores.
What: Nike PSA 260 MP3 Run
There were, at last count, 400 billion different MP3 players on the market, most of them indistinguishable from each other and few of them anywhere near as user-friendly as Apple's iPod. That said, there aren't many examples of purpose-built music players on the market, which makes the upcoming Nike MP3 Run so unique. Co-designed by Nike and Philips, it is custom-designed for serious runners, with a stopwatch, a blinking LED light to ensure you don't get run over by passing trucks, and a Bluetooth connection to a wireless speed and distance sensor that you wear on your shoe. The information gathered by the sensor can be displayed on the player, or can be read by voice feedback at the touch of a button. Plus, you can upload telemetry data to www.nikerunning.com for review. The main drawback is the limited 256MB of internal memory--a pittance by iPod standards, but enough for around four hours of music. And if you're still running that marathon after four hours, you don't need telemetry analysis to tell you that you didn't win.
What: Philips Polymer Vision Electronic Paper
Screen technology is experiencing an engineering renaissance. Scientists have developed speaker screens (see above), as well as advanced 3D displays, and fingerprint-scanning touchscreens, but one of the most anticipated technologies is the flexible screen. Sometimes referred to as "electronic paper," these thin, lightweight, reflective screens require only enough power to refresh the image on the screen, and can therefore view tens of thousands of pages of information using a few AA batteries. If it is developed right, this holds enormous potential for the publishing industry. Just think: You could wirelessly downloaded all of your favorite newspapers and magazines each morning to a device that was only a single sheet thick, and then you could take it with you and read it anywhere. Here we have an image of a prototype screen developed by electronic paper pioneers E Ink and Philips. The first product with E Ink's technology just hit the market in Asia, the admittedly non-rollable Sony LIBRIé--an electronic book that can store up to 500 novels.