When country music millionaire Kenny Rogers advertised that his Atlanta mansion with eight bathrooms was up for sale, the joke at the Grand Old Opry that night was nobody knew Kenny read that much. Thanks to Honeywell Corp., Kenny now could Web surf instead of read with WebPad (www.honeywell.com).
At $995 per “pad,” these 10-inch-square LCD mobile computer screens work like portable home telephones, with a central docking station that receives the data and then broadcasts it into the portable device anywhere within 150 feet. The base station, says Honeywell, works best with high-speed DSL or cable modem connections and will serve up to eight users.
Wireless, water-resistant and built of high-impact plastic, the keyboardless gadgets use a Microsoft Pocket PC version of the Windows operating system. Plastic scroll buttons and back/forward browsing tabs move users around the Internet and e-mail. If you think that’s grand, that’s what it’s going to cost you.
THOU ART GOOD
AND CHEAP TOO
Chicago-based Liquidart Ltd. bets heavily that honesty will pay in a world where Napster music pirates fill their hard drives with bootlegged tunes and sleep like guilt-free babies. For $6.95, plus tax, the www.liquidart.com Web site offers high-quality fine art files of everything from Salvador Dali’s limp watches to Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit models. Downloads make ultraclassy screen savers and even give Joe and Jill Six-Pack digital art displays to match the screens in Bill Gates’ Virtual Xanadu mansion in Seattle.
Unlike Napster, you pay a fair price and own the rights to personal use, fair and square. Only a cad would call up a liquid art offering, press Alt+Print Screen and paste the picture in the Windows Paint program without paying the modest $6.95 for a better version.
GORED ON THE WEB
A GUY THING?
No more lame jokes about Al Gore inventing the Internet! Puhleeze! But consider this, a whopping 88 percent of Internet users intend to vote in the presidential election. And as a group, they are rabidly (or at least registered) Republican.
The latest Media Metrix Election 2000 Internet poll found that of male Internet users who say they will vote, 41 percent are Republican and a paltry 23 percent are Democrats, with the rest undecided. Female Internet users who plan to vote are split 32.6 percent Republican to 32.3 percent Democrat, with the rest undecided.
Details at www.mmxi.com. Read dem and weep, Al.
OCTOBER SURPRISE
PENTIUM PUNT
PC-makers are spooked by the sudden scrapping of a pre-Halloween launch of Pentium 4, which was supposed to be ready for ultrahot game-oriented PCs for the all-important holiday sales season. By delaying the 1.4 gigahertz chip until at least Nov. 20 instead of Oct. 30, Intel will see fewer machines in the so-called consumer channel, where the Pentium III replacement was expected to be a seasonal sizzler.
