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Trek With Your Tech
( 2/ 2/00; 9:00 AM EST) Developers are furiously networking homes, putting smart chips in every appliance under one roof. But for me, technology is about adventure -- not wiring a LAN that lets the television talk to the air conditioning unit, which, in turn, knows when an exterior door has been opened. I prefer gizmos and gadgets that put technology at my fingertips -- wherever they happen to roam. Top-tier hardware and software companies turned the smart appliance techno evolution into colossal themes at last month's Consumer Electronics Show and at Fall/Comdex '99. It's fine for the rarefied billionaires with very, very large houses. Let them turn their mansions and vacation lodges into laboratories for consumer appliances. But for the new century, the high-tech wonders I'll pay hard-earned cash for will make outdoor life more of an adventure. Why wire the abode when the whole wide world beckons? Now that GPS is everywhere, taking trips will never be the same. Just pick up a GPS receiver with an electronic moving map, and instantly access information about highways, cities, lakes, rivers, and interstate exits. Some of the models feature full color, large screens and can find addresses or locate restaurants and hotels. They mount on a dashboard or work in tandem with cell phones. Why wire the domicile when you can attach a wireless modem or cell phone to a laptop and hit the hiking trail or bike path -- then send faxes or e-mail from virtually anywhere. Take a kayak. Paddle a canoe. Ride a bike. Jump on a bus, train, subway, or ferry. From there, you can connect to the corporate network wirelessly with a WAN interface card. Serious Internet users need no longer suffer the indignities of being tied to a land line. At its revolutionary best, technology is about freedom, about making adventure possible. It is liberating. Words to live by, for sure. But some people just don't get it. Take the young, sophisticated, upwardly mobile, urban couple in a TV advertisement for flat-panel television. In the spot, they look for the best place to mount their new monitor, and they eventually settle on the ceiling above their bed. The ad is cute, creative, and incongruous. How could the pair stay so slender if they're laying on their backs watching a flat-panel television in their beds? Are they sick or something? Instead of curling up in bed and staring at the ceiling tube, they, too, should get out of their apartment and live a little! That bed-ridden couple could watch movies from the palms of their hands with one of the DVD players now on the market. One lets you view videos on a 5-inch wide, 280,000-pixel LCD monitor for up to three hours. Or they could watch movies from an external DVD drive on a notebook computer. Another cool thingamabob actually turns your laptop into a portable TV and stereo. It receives broadcasts from local stations and has a throughput of up to 30 frames per second. Isn't that enough incentive to strap on a backpack and journey outside the bedroom to watch TV? I marvel at all the new digital cameras, PDAs, mobile speech recognition products, car PCs, wearable computers, PCs in a pocket, and advances in power-supply products. For now, though, I'm taking the Sony Walkman for a stroll and dreaming about the next generation of on-the-go electronics. © 1998 CMP Media, Inc. |
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