It's all about the gadgets
Going to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV, is one of my highlights for the year, as it makes me feel like a kid in a candy store. It's amazing how much progress has been made in the application of technology for the purpose of entertainment�and how much room there is for growth.
We may not have technology as advanced as my friends here, but we're getting there.
Software convergence and the concept of seamless computing is slowly being realized, with the emergence of home media servers, DVD recorders with hard drives, and TV sets with flash memory card readers (and hard drives) blurring the line between images, computer data, and video. This mixing of the waters continues in the personal electronics arena, with pocket media players, MP3 decks that can also act as portable hard drives (it seems like everything has a hard drive in it now), and PDA/phones that actually perform both tasks well. Just about every exhibit had some new gadget, gimcrack, or gewgaw that performed multiple functions.
The standards battle is still being fought on several fronts, from DVD-recordable to the next-generation DVD war between HD and Blu-ray technologies. Someone needs to tell these guys that launching multiple incompatible formats is not necessarily the most intelligent thing to do.
Some of the show highlights included Samsung's 80-in. plasma display, the 7-in.-deep InFocus ScreenPlay, a 61-in. HDTV rear-projection TV, and the ApeXtreme PC, a Windows-based computer gaming console that lets you play your PC games on your TV. Other devices and technologies of note include the Radeon 9800 XT graphics accelerator card, the 0.85-in. hard drive from Toshiba, and NXT's flat-panel speaker technology.
The hardest part of the show was the effort I made trying to see it all, which left me exhausted at the end of each day. That's when I would stagger into Quark's Bar at the Hilton, my shoulder bag full of flyers, catalogs, and brochures, to hang out with my alien friends (every gadget guy has a little Star Trek in him, that's what got me into this game in the first place.)
�Alix L. Paultre, Senior Editor
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