Thanks for the memory
This year's Consumer Electronic Show was one of evolution, not revolution. Sure, there were ever-bigger flat-panel monitors and ever-smaller portable devices, but the hubbub over the major technology achievements that overshadowed recent shows has been replaced by the jockeying of marketers trying to deliver those technologies to the marketplace.
Tiny hard drives are among the factors bringing increased memory capability to every device, whether it needs it or not
This is not to say that there wasn't any new technology introduced, just that the current focus is more on providing those technologies in new products that are attractive to the average consumer. Competing technologies such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are fighting for the hearts and minds (and dollars) of the public, and portable devices mount increasingly complex feature sets as designers lard on cheap functionality in an attempt to capture jaded and fickle users.
A common thread runs though all of today's products, reminding me of a time I once had the great honor to meet Nobutoshi Kihara, former managing director of Sony (Tokyo, Japan) and current chairman of the Sony-Kihara Research Center. I was part of a press group visiting the facility, and of course we jumped at the opportunity to meet the man who invented many of the devices that have shaped consumer electronics as we know it today.
We asked him to tell us what his favorite invention was, and he first responded “Betamax,” then corrected himself and said “Mavica” (I can only assume he flashed on the poor commercial performance of his favorite invention and decided to go with a more popular product). We then asked him what he thought would be the Next Big Thing, and he simply replied, “Memory.”
Before any of us could muster up a decent follow-up question, we were escorted out of Kihara-San's office, left to ponder what the enigmatic answer meant. After attending this year's Consumer Electronic Show, I now understand.
Everything has memory in it now, and the amount of that memory is growing at a very rapid rate. More and more people carry around a USB memory key as a matter of course, and the average teenager has more memory capability in an MP3 player than I had access to when I was working as an electronic-warfare analyst in the Army back in the 1980s.
Having a terabyte of memory at one's beck and call is no longer in the realm of science fiction, as evidenced by the $999 TeraStation RAID storage system from Buffalo Technology (Austin, TX), and DVR entertainment systems in the works that will place 1-terabyte drives in set-top cable boxes and HD-DVD or Blu-Ray recorders.
This explosion of available memory is fueled in part by continuously falling flash memory prices as well as ever-shrinking hard drives. The 0.85-in. hard disk from Toshiba (Tokyo, Japan) is at the heart of that company's new “Gigastyle” concept that will put hard drives in everything from media players to still and video cameras, giving everyone as much media storage as an old Hollywood cowboy had bullets.
Alix L. Paultre, Executive Editor
apaultre@hearst.com
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