Comdex … slow, but a valuable trip …
I just returned from Comdex, and there were some real valuable finds … in a wide range of areas. I’ll be writing about a number of the companies and solutions in future stories, and as I get to evaluate the products. There were also a number of trends that were noticeable … the prescence of numerous tablet computers, wearable computers, heads up displays, 802.11b, Bluetooth, 802.11a, and solid state disk drives.
Tablets and wearables …
It seemed that there were a large number of WinCE tablet computers at Comdex this year. I am not impressed with these machines … although they appear to provide some level of features and functions. WinCE is still a limited OS, and the application support just isn’t there. Although the current price point is very good, most of the vendors were even pushing their solutions as a Windows “thin-client” solution … remotely display applications that were running on another machine. This just doesn’t make sense to me.
Peppered throughout the various WinCE solutions, were a few unique solutions that caught my attention … of course Xybernaut, along with PaceBlade, and a few others. These are full blown PCs, running full operatings systems. The PaceBlade was actually impressive as a tablet PC. I’m thinking that I will have to get one to try!
Wireless … why Bluetooth is lame …
I really wanted to check out the situation with Bluetooth wireless … and I found that it is in a miserable state! The products are coming available … most are already falling into commodity pricing due to Pacific Rim manufacturers. The software however sucks … big time! Most every vendor had their own little applications that would display Bluetooth devices and services, and allow for you to interact with these … but all in their own unique ways. The worst part of this is that I could not find a vendor who was willing to give away a developer kit that would allow the creation of new and innovative applications! When I found a vendor who seemed to think it was a good idea, they immediately indicated that they could put one together for me for thousands of dollars … yeah, right! Why would I pay for a dev kit to sell more hardware for a company? They could be paying me to assist them! How do they expect the “killer app” to be created for Bluetooth, when no one is releasing the foundation for new applications to developers? Bluetooth is doomed, IMHO, unless the vendors do something soon.
I’m meeting with a friend who works on the Bluetooth standards commitee on Monday … I am going to have a long talk with her and see what can be done …
Solid state flash disk …
One last thing for this post … the solid state disks are looking good. There were several vendors who offered IDE solid state flash disks with up to 2GB of capacity. This is going to be very good for the mobile market, and also for more fault tolerence in server boot drives of Internet appliances. These things are lightweight, fast, and reliable. They can take 1MM writes per sector … so it’s a lot of data. You will want an OS that does read-after-write verifications though …
I’ll be writing more soon … but the trip was inspiring … there were a lot of the components that I have been looking for … so that I can continue to create the future …