Hardware and gadgets

Car maker Volkswagen has introduced a new user interface for its automobiles, called Gypsy. Some VW models have a large LCD screen in the center console, and will not only display the usual car information, but also knows how to talk to devices like an iPod or a Palm PDA.

Bill Gates' head exploded yesterday in a tragic puff of smoke after reading that a Windows benchmarking study showed that the new Apple laptop with a dual core Intel processor was faster running Windows XP than, um, well, all the laptops designed for Windows.

Samsung has announced a 32 gigabyte solid state flash memory device. This memory storage unit could completely replace the hard drive in a laptop, while allowing big reductions in weight and increasing speed. The weight savings come directly from the smaller size and weight of the device compared to a hard drive, but because this unit uses up to 95% less power, the battery in a laptop with this could be much smaller as well. And the laptop could be thinner, too.

Bill Gates recently scoffed at the effort of MIT and other partners to build a $100 computer for emerging markets, mostly in the third world.

I think the laptop is a dying device. They will not disappear entirely, but ten years from now, you won't see them very often.

On the desktop, most of us will have something that looks a lot like the Mac mini--a very small, quiet, fast, and unobtrusive device. Or we will have something like the iMac, where there is no box at all. Windows versions of the mini are already appearing.

The phone is dead. After a couple of months with my Treo 650, which integrates a Palm PDA and a phone, I'm convinced. And equipment manufacturers are releasing more and more smartphones that integrate similar functions, meaining I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

For those of us that travel frequently, it's mostly a chore to lug around a laptop. Treos and Blackberries are fine for sending a short, urgent message, but many of us has real work to do in the morning or in the evening while on the road. For that you need a full size keyboard and display.

An iPod user has filed a federal lawsuit against Apple alleging that the popular music players cause hearing damage. The suit claims that Apple knows the volume can be set too high--so high that it causes permanent damage.

Skype continues to expand its grip on the Internet voice telephony marketplace by providing technical specs that describe how to build a phone with Skype software built in. MSNBC has an article that describes a whole slew of new Skype phones. The new handsets untether Skype calls from a computer handset.

If I were a reporter or a doctor, I'd want one of these. There have been various iPod add-ons that allowed you to record audio, but this one is neatly integrated and provides high fidelity recording.

Another gadget from the Consumer Electronics Show that is intriguing is a pen size color scanner. I was pretty skeptical when I read about this; years ago I had a big, clunky, handheld black and white scanner that you could roll across a document. It was awful; no matter how hard you tried, you got blurry, uneven scans. It's main attribute was its price, which I think was a couple of hundred dollars, at a time when a flat bed scanner cost several thousand dollars. Nonetheless, the money was wasted.

When companies start making real products for some other company's service, you know something is going on. Skype is beginning to make real inroads on the VoIP marketplace, and hardware manufacturers think there is money to be made.

XING is a conference phone made expressly to work with Skype and only Skype. Niche market? Yes, but apparently big enough to actually make stuff for it.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing, and like past years, an incredible and often amusing array of new gadgets are on display. One company has combined the craze for those rubber wristbands with a USB memory stick. I wouldn't wear one because they don't match my loafers, but I suspect they may be popular with teenagers.

The "wearable computer" crowd typically lashes together wierd looking stuff that seems to have come from a bad sci fi movie--elaborate belt packs with wires hanging off them, strange goggles with built in displays--nothing you or I would ever get near.

What's the biggest "wearable computer" in the world? It's the iPod, which was designed with attention to both form and function, rather than as a technology demonstration.

Apple is apparently set to sell about 4 million iPods per month in the last quarter of 2005, breaking all records. The iPod has crushed the competition in Japan by capturing 60% of the marketplace, with Sony a huge loser. And more than 73 million cars will be manufactured in 2006 as "ready for iPod."

Engadget has some pictures from a design competition sponsored by Microsoft. The company wanted industrial designers to think about what personal and office computers might look like in the future.

Some of the designs are interesting, and suggest that what we call a "desk" may change dramatically as displays get larger and we spend more time (if that's possible) connected.

Two counties in Florida have decided to dump electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold after it was shown how easy it was to alter voting results.

County and city supervisors and elections officials across the country have failed miserably to do due diligence on this issue. Millions in taxpayer funds have been spent on faulty machines. It is a national disgrace.

Actually, VoIP phones have been around for a while, but they have been relatively obscure and/or clunky. Vonage offers an adapter box that plugs into your computer, and then lets you plug any "normal" phone into it. An easy way to continue using a plain old telephone, but you end up with yet another box, power adapter, and cables to further clutter up your workspace.

iPod accessories has become a huge marketplace that has created hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and an entirely new industry, just in the past three years. It's another example of why it is so important to adopt a futures-oriented approach to economic development planning. No one could have predicted the rapid emergence of an entirely new market five years ago. Trying to plan economic development growth by looking only at what has worked in the past necessarily limits a region's ability to capitalize on Knowledge Economy opportunities.

The military does have a sense of humor. The Air Force has developed a laser-powered device that temporarily impairs a person's vision, apparently like staring into the sun. They named the device the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response, or PHaSR. The device will be used for crowd control and will give military police a nonlethal alternative to guns.