Bleeding Rock (photography by Ed H. Chi)

COMDEX 2002

Some of the most interesting things I saw

Ed H. Chi

	Despite being smaller than previous years, this is by far the largest COMDEX I have ever been to. Comdex is estimated at only 1/4 of the size at the peak of Comdex and only 1/2 of the size last year in terms the number of vendors. I gave a talk at the COMDEX Educational Program, and had an article in the COMDEX magazine (preview, and Wed. Edition).
	The big news this year is that MS Tablet PC is here, and everyone seems to want one. The major players in this market appears to be Toshiba, Fujitsu, Compaq, Motion Computing, and Acer.
Mobile devices remains to be a big area, but it's not quite like in past years. This is a very cool wrist watch that runs Palm OS, which won Best of COMDEX. Made by Fossil. The watch features Palm OS 4.1, a Motorola DragonBallVZ 33MHz CPU, a touch screen with a stylus for Graffiti input, 2 MB of RAM and 2 MB of Flash, 16 level grayscale with backlight, a rocker switch, an IR port, a rechargeable battery, and the usual Address Book, Date Book, Memo Pad, Calculator, and To Do list. Price TBD.
	A company's vision of ergonomic future. You're enclosed in a module that provides display, keyboard and mouse tray.
A company's vision of how you might feed your dog in the future. The dogfood and water is delivered by a timer that you can access either over the web or via your cellphone. I wonder if your dog would like this. I mean, why get a dog if you're not going to be around to take care of it. That's half the fun!
	Stu Card had this idea of using the finger muscles as your mouse for a long time in the early 80s. This company rediscovered the future. I wonder if they have a patent and if we can invalidate it. In either case, the idea is that your finger muscles are more agile and transmits more bits than your arm muscles, so you can get better precision with this device. You can sign your name for instance.
Security in a kit. They have the network watching equipment and screw drivers, and all you need to find out if your network is being hacked.
	3D still sells. Just some piece of software that allows you to construct your own screen saver album with pictures on a rotating cube. It feels like you're in a rotating room.
Media Center PCs are making their way into your living rooms. The idea is to have the PC take over as the main piece of stereo and entertainment center hub. I wonder why Microsoft isn't pushing this harder, because it seems like a no-brainer to me. Perhaps they don't have all of the software strategies in place yet, but you can pretty much build your own now. AlienWare is one of the few that is the first our of the block.
	Heat heat heat is a big problem in the future. Andy Grove recently said that our problem with power leakage and heat is becoming a major engineering concern. There are a number of cooling solutions on the floor, and COMDEX seems like a box-builder heaven. This is one of the water-cooling solutions. Below is one of the most quiet fans on the market.

Last, but not least:

DISPLAYS

	Displays everywhere. It was crazy. I don't think I have seen so many flat-panels and $8000 plasma screens in one single place. Samsung has a huge area on their latest displays.
	Six panels with very little seams between them, all pieced together with a nice stand in the back.
	3D display on a notebook LCD panel format without the need for stereo glasses. This was actually quite compelling.
	The Viewsonic version of the Big Bertha IBM Display. 9 Megapixels. VP2290b. The 22-inch display is a 9.2 megapixel LCD monitor with a density of 204 pixels per inch and a native resolution of 3840 x 2400 pixels. It was gorgeous. ~$8000. Enuff Said.