One of the hottest items at Comdex-Las Vegas is not for sale: a 40-inch, flat-screen, thin computer/TV monitor. This is unfortunate for Sharp, the monitor’s developer: In the past few days, a handful of fat cats with money to burn have attempted to buy it “at any price,” Sharp representatives said.
“This is a technological statement,” said Bruce Pollack, national marketing manager for Sharp. “There are only two of these in the world.”
Despite generous offers to buy the high-definition, plasma prototype, Pollack said Sharp wants to wait until the price can be more affordable, though he declined to say exactly how unaffordable the monitor might be at the moment.
“It’s a few years off,” he said.
Samsung, which also was showing a “concept model” — this one a 21.3-inch LCD display monitor — said the current $10,000 price tag was too high for the U.S. market.
“People won’t pay $5 more (than a regular monitor) for a flat panel, 14- to 15-inch monitor these days,” said Samsung representative Tom Striegler. “Unfortunately, money is an object to these folks.”
IOMEGA: LET’S GET SMALL
If there’s any theme at Comdex this week, it’s that smaller is better. Smaller hand-held personal computers, smaller digital cameras, smaller phones. Add to that list smaller, more powerful storage disks.
Iomega introduced its new “n hand” disks which can hold 20 megabytes of storage on a piece of plastic about the size of a half-dollar. (Conventional 3-1/2-inch floppies hold 1.5 megabytes of disk storage.) Iomega spokesman Bill Tolson said the disks will slip into cartridges that fit into the company’s high-capacity Zip and Jaz drives.
The new disks, for example, can hold nearly 100 photos taken in a digital camera, as opposed to about half a dozen for conventional floppies.
Tolson said Iomega currently is working with consumer electronics manufacturers, particularly makers of digital cameras, to build the tiny, removable disks into their products.
“Expect to see this come out in new consumer products in the second half of next year,” he said.
YES, THAT’S A BROCHURE — AND YES, WE’RE GLAD TO SEE YOU
When a huge high technology conference (read: 200,000 socially maladjusted propeller heads) hits Las Vegas, (a city known for little more than excess), the porn vendors get to work.
All streets leading up to the convention center this week are lined with men and women offering pamphlets, palm cards and brochures of, shall we say, women of the evening. Likewise, the streets themselves are lined with the literature — discarded, no doubt, by scandalized conventioneers.
Tuesday afternoon, Las Vegas police officers — feigning outrage — rounded up a dozen of the distributors and charged them with creating a public nuisance. By Wednesday morning, the intrepid distributors were back out in force, unable to pass up a golden opportunity.
SURF’S UP … SO TAKE THE LAPTOP
As all the top computer manufacturers are touting new hand-held computers that can be taken anywhere, Inglewood, Calif.-based Getac is quietly going commercial with its waterproof, shock-proof laptops that truly can be taken anywhere — including to the pool, in a rain storm or on a roller coaster. Originally developed four years ago for the military industry, Getac, a Lockheed-Martin subsidiary, now hopes their I/IX Series IP66 Rugged Industrial Notebook will find a place on the retail market.
The computer can withstand vigorous vibration and shock, is impervious to moisture and condensation, and performs equally well in a sandstorm and a dirt pile, Getac spokesman Mike Simek said.
“Police use them in their cars,” Simek said. “For them, of course, they have to be sugar- and coffee- and doughnut-proof.”
The Pentium computer retails for as much as $9,000. Another model, which can withstand coffee spills but not necessarily dunks in the bathtub, sells for about $4,500.
HELLO? COMDEX?
What could be the most embarrassing snafu to happen at the year’s biggest high technology conference? Just ask AT&T, which underestimated just how much cell phone traffic the 210,000 attendees of Comdex-Las Vegas would create.
On Monday, the first day of the conference, cell phone users got nothing but busy signals each time they tried to dial out. By midday, the lines for pay phones started looking very, shall we say, long distance.
AT&T rushed additional switching equipment to the Las Vegas Convention Center by Monday night; by Tuesday morning, cell phone users were able to resume smooth sailing over the airwaves.
NEW MICE GET ERGONOMIC
As professionals spend more time than ever on their computers, manufacturers of new types of keyboard mice hope they’ll also start thinking about becoming more ergonomically correct.
Comdex this week is featuring various new pointing devices — including mice that custom-fit the user’s cupped palm, foot-controlled mice and wireless palm mice.
GET A VISA INTO THE ‘NET
As though there weren’t already too many varieties of credit cards available, now comes a new kind that lets users access their account activity on the Internet without special software. At Comdex this week, Block Financial, a Georgia-based subsidiary of H&R Block, is promoting WebCard Visa, which comes with an annual percentage rate that starts at 8.9 percent, then moves to 17.1 percent after six months.
WebCard holders can access the last year’s worth of statements, and all account activity can be directly downloaded into Quicken, Excel, and other personal finance and spreadsheet programs.
Michelle Crozier, a marketer for the credit card, said security concerns should be assured by the fact that transactions are encrypted by SSL (secure sockets layer) technology, the industry standard. Even better — Block Financial guarantees compensation for any unauthorized transaction on customers’ accounts.
CHECK OUT ‘SEINFELD’ — AND YOUR E-MAIL
The technology world appears committed to eliminating every possible excuse that sports fanatics might have to leave the couch. WebTV has been around for a few months, allowing users to flip between television and the Internet on their TV monitor.
On the first day of Comdex, however, Sharp introduced a 32-inch-wide screen television that allows users to do both at the same time: Watch television on one half while surfing the Internet or using E-mail on the
other. One could, for example, watch the Bears lose while checking up-to-the minute stats of every player in the game in attempt to understand this perplexing phenomenon. Upon every bad call, fans could simultaneously vent to thousands in a Bears chat room.
The Sharp 32C-PC1, said Jim Misurelli, a marketing manager for the PC maker, was introduced in Japan just this week, but won’t be available in the United States until late 1997. Misurelli struggled a bit with the Japanese-only commands — not to mention the remote that looked complicated enough to launch a ground-to-air missile. The unit, which has a 28.8 bps built-in modem, retails for $3,300, though Misurelli said Sharp hopes that price will drop to about $1,000 by the time it sells in the United States.
KISS THAT VCR GOODBYE — MAYBE
One of the hottest new technologies on this opening day of Comdex is DVD (digital video disk), which allows 25 times more data to be compressed on a traditional CD-ROM. This means full-length movies can be stored on a single-sided DVD — and up to 8 hours on double-sided disks.
Is this the end of those bulky Blockbuster video cartridges?
The compression technology that allows Toshiba and six other major manufacturers this month to begin marketing the DVD drive is called MPEG2. MPEG2 remembers only what has changed from frame to frame, thereby saving storage space.
Within a year, Toshiba expects to make available DVD drives on which users can record their own home videos. The end of the videocassettes, Toshiba spokesman Tom Jones theorizes, is near.
Jones, director of support engineering in Toshiba’s disk products division, assured curious onlookers this isn’t just another way for employees to waste time on the corporate dime while appearing to be hard at work on their computers. “This can be used for training and in the edutainment area, where one can take the theme of a movie, say, and make it interactive. It can be used as a learning experience for children.
At this point, the applications appear to be less edu than tainment. Expensive edutainment, at that. To add a stand alone DVD drive to one’s existing CD-ROM-equipped computer costs $700 to $800. Built-in DVDs would add an additional $600 to the cost of a new computer. The good news? Those old CD-ROMs still work fine in DVD drives.
NO NEWS, BUT THANKS FOR COMING
It’s not every day that a high-technology firm benefits from misinformation, but Iomega, maker of the popular Zip and Jaz drives that store megaloads of information, was beseiged by reporters eager to know what happened at a special Monday morning announcement they all seemed to miss.
An official Comdex schedule included mention of the news conference, and an AOL chat room was abuzz over the weekend with speculation about what new product would be announced.
“There was no press conference,” one Iomega spokesperson said with a smile. “But the rumor has been a great way of getting reporters over to our booth.”
