The Next New Things - connectivity is trend in development of hand-held computers and other personal electronics
AT ONE point Ken Hinckley's hand-held computer may have been a store-bought model, but now it's covered with funky bulges, wrapped in white electrical tape, and bears only a superficial resemblance to a pocket PC you might carry. However, Ken Hinckley's hand-held computer is a lot smarter than yours. It knows to turn itself on when Hinckley picks it up. When he tilts the computer on its side (so the screen is lengthwise), the text automatically shifts 90 degrees, too, making it easy for Hinckley to read Excel spreadsheets. And when he's finished, all he has to do to turn it off is put it down.
Hinckley, a Microsoft researcher, is among the techno vanguard--with counterparts at Apple, IBM, Intel and a legion of other high-tech firms--whose job it is to figure out what must-have, practical and just plain neat-o advances will be next to hit your local Best Buy. And if you link the crystal balls of these researchers together, the word that best describes the next big things in personal electronics is connectivity.
Connectivity will come in two important forms. First, various devices--hand-helds, phones, computers, TVs, DVD players--will work together so seamlessly that the devices will blend together physically. RealNetworks, the Internet's leader in bringing video and audio to computers, is already working with cell-phone and handheld computer makers to develop models that play music and video. Says Ralph Bond, consumer-education manager for Intel: "The emphasis on digital music and digital video is really just the beginning."
The second important goal of connectivity is to make electronic devices, like Hinckley's hand-held computer, that respond to human habits, rather than making humans adapt to machine protocols.
The tech companies recognize that adapting devices to their owners' individual needs isn't just a job for engineers. The Microsoft research team also includes artists, graphic designers, linguists, psychologists and sociologists, all working to reduce the amount of time and adaptation it takes for people to learn to work with computers. For example, when you organize your house, you may put a favorite book on your nightstand, magazines in a basket in the den, and a list of what to buy at the store in a kitchen drawer. Physical space and special locations help you organize. So, instead of storing his favorite Web pages in a folder and accessing them through a drop-down menu, Microsoft researcher Dan Robbins keeps his Web bookmarks in a virtual "room" on his computer.
This room, complete with tables, chairs and a couch, is littered with miniature Web pages "copied" from the real Web. Robbins stores the pages on the walls, floors and even the ceiling of his virtual room--wherever it seems natural. "People are used to keeping their possessions in real space," Robbins says. "I'm trying to reproduce that natural organization here on the screen." (Don't expect to find virtual-room software in stores anytime soon.)
Not soon enough
ALL THIS innovation can't come soon enough for Silicon Valley. The market for personal computers is nearly saturated, and the number of people going online for work and play is starting to plateau. So high-tech companies need more compelling reasons for us to buy more electronics, especially faster computers.
And until we have such good reasons, we're not buying. Intel has spent this year trying to persuade consumers that a $1,500 Pentium 4 computer is better than a $900 Pentium III--with little success. The bottom line: Few new software programs take advantage of the Pentium 4 chip.
The industry has a litany of uses for Pentium 4s that aren't quite ready for prime rime. For example, voice recognition and graphics as crisp as a movie screen "will really make it necessary to have a powerful computer running things," Bond predicts.
Faster chips will also drive the next wave of wireless phones, due out by the end of 2002. These phones, using what the cell-phone industry calls third-generation, or 3G, technology, will be able to handle voice and data at speeds that far surpass today's dial-up modems for computers. By 2004, most major cities should be wired to handle 3G, and you'll be able to use your phone to punch up streaming video, Web pages and even order forms for tickets and books.
But then, button pushing itself may become obsolete. Both IBM and Microsoft are working hard to make personal computers truly understand, translate and respond to human speech. Microsoft researcher Bill Dolan has created a program that gets us halfway there: It allows the user to type in a question, which the computer then answers in the form of a sentence. So if you asked the computer, "When was Abraham Lincoln assassinated?" the response, which takes about five seconds, would be: "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865."
That simple, direct answer is deceptively simple. It actually requires a powerful computer and "half a dozen different programs, working in concert," says Dolan, to produce it. The computer has to analyze the question's sentence structure, picking out the subject, verb, qualifier, etc. It then determines the probability of the sentence's meaning; taking the top three or four probable meanings, it runs a search through a database of facts, which may be as small as a dictionary or as large as the entire Internet. The computer finds pages of information containing the words "assassination," "president" and "Lincoln," then finds a date on the same page.
Hinckley, a Microsoft researcher, is among the techno vanguard--with counterparts at Apple, IBM, Intel and a legion of other high-tech firms--whose job it is to figure out what must-have, practical and just plain neat-o advances will be next to hit your local Best Buy. And if you link the crystal balls of these researchers together, the word that best describes the next big things in personal electronics is connectivity.
Connectivity will come in two important forms. First, various devices--hand-helds, phones, computers, TVs, DVD players--will work together so seamlessly that the devices will blend together physically. RealNetworks, the Internet's leader in bringing video and audio to computers, is already working with cell-phone and handheld computer makers to develop models that play music and video. Says Ralph Bond, consumer-education manager for Intel: "The emphasis on digital music and digital video is really just the beginning."
The second important goal of connectivity is to make electronic devices, like Hinckley's hand-held computer, that respond to human habits, rather than making humans adapt to machine protocols.
The tech companies recognize that adapting devices to their owners' individual needs isn't just a job for engineers. The Microsoft research team also includes artists, graphic designers, linguists, psychologists and sociologists, all working to reduce the amount of time and adaptation it takes for people to learn to work with computers. For example, when you organize your house, you may put a favorite book on your nightstand, magazines in a basket in the den, and a list of what to buy at the store in a kitchen drawer. Physical space and special locations help you organize. So, instead of storing his favorite Web pages in a folder and accessing them through a drop-down menu, Microsoft researcher Dan Robbins keeps his Web bookmarks in a virtual "room" on his computer.
This room, complete with tables, chairs and a couch, is littered with miniature Web pages "copied" from the real Web. Robbins stores the pages on the walls, floors and even the ceiling of his virtual room--wherever it seems natural. "People are used to keeping their possessions in real space," Robbins says. "I'm trying to reproduce that natural organization here on the screen." (Don't expect to find virtual-room software in stores anytime soon.)
Not soon enough
ALL THIS innovation can't come soon enough for Silicon Valley. The market for personal computers is nearly saturated, and the number of people going online for work and play is starting to plateau. So high-tech companies need more compelling reasons for us to buy more electronics, especially faster computers.
And until we have such good reasons, we're not buying. Intel has spent this year trying to persuade consumers that a $1,500 Pentium 4 computer is better than a $900 Pentium III--with little success. The bottom line: Few new software programs take advantage of the Pentium 4 chip.
The industry has a litany of uses for Pentium 4s that aren't quite ready for prime rime. For example, voice recognition and graphics as crisp as a movie screen "will really make it necessary to have a powerful computer running things," Bond predicts.
Faster chips will also drive the next wave of wireless phones, due out by the end of 2002. These phones, using what the cell-phone industry calls third-generation, or 3G, technology, will be able to handle voice and data at speeds that far surpass today's dial-up modems for computers. By 2004, most major cities should be wired to handle 3G, and you'll be able to use your phone to punch up streaming video, Web pages and even order forms for tickets and books.
But then, button pushing itself may become obsolete. Both IBM and Microsoft are working hard to make personal computers truly understand, translate and respond to human speech. Microsoft researcher Bill Dolan has created a program that gets us halfway there: It allows the user to type in a question, which the computer then answers in the form of a sentence. So if you asked the computer, "When was Abraham Lincoln assassinated?" the response, which takes about five seconds, would be: "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865."
That simple, direct answer is deceptively simple. It actually requires a powerful computer and "half a dozen different programs, working in concert," says Dolan, to produce it. The computer has to analyze the question's sentence structure, picking out the subject, verb, qualifier, etc. It then determines the probability of the sentence's meaning; taking the top three or four probable meanings, it runs a search through a database of facts, which may be as small as a dictionary or as large as the entire Internet. The computer finds pages of information containing the words "assassination," "president" and "Lincoln," then finds a date on the same page.