The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Comdex 2000 George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au

This is not a computer show any more. It is still vast, covering many large halls in two locations and attracts huge crowds. The Microsoft and associates stand was probably larger than the whole IT show in Melbourne. There were over 2,200 exhibitors but only three of them displayed computers. A scan of the exhibition layout showed some large areas where like technologies were on show - biometrics, Bluetooth, Microsoft partners, Palm partners, smart cards, and the Linux Business Expo. Naturally many stands had computers but the were hidden and used as tools to display software, etc.

So what was on the show you ask? The theme, in my opinion, could be said to be "Smaller and Smarter."

By far the largest change from the prior shows was the huge number of hand-held devices and accessories and many forthcoming wireless applications. The main groups of handheld devices were PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant). This is a term for any small mobile hand-held device that provides computing and information storage. The Palm range of PDAs is perhaps the best-known example. Many MP3 players were also demonstrated.
 
The developments in PDAs such as the Palm range will be huge. A critical mass has probably been reached and Palm has 110,000 developers working in producing new software and hardware. The rate of change is staggering. Handspring, a company using the Palm operating system has gone through five generations in three years. Some of the add-ons for the Palm were MP3 players, digital cameras, voice recorders, medical diagnostic devices, memory expansions, bar code scanners, GPS (Global Positioning Systems) that show where you are on a street map and give you directions by voice to guide you to the destination and many others including the wireless modem for e-mail, surfing etc.
 
For those with Palms or similar devices, there was an application that could be beamed to the PDA which provided the exhibition maps and exhibitors list. The paper version was like a regional phone book and not something you would want to carry around. In future I expect that a wireless connection will show where you are on the map and how far you have walked. There was software to turn the Palm into a universal remote control including one application that could be used as a controller for a slide presentation. The growth in PDAs can be attributed in part to Palm offering cheap licensing of the operating system and Springboard having an open architecture for their PDAs.
 
Wristwatches with inbuilt GPS were demonstrated as was a wristwatch that has a digital camera built in which transferred the images by in Infrared link. The display on the watch was adequate to easily recognise individuals in a group photo.
 
IBM showed their 1 GB drive that is the size of a postage stamp, with controller, and the thickness of a $2 coin. It can be used in many devices such as PDAs and digital cameras.
 
More mobile phones will be using the WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) to send and receive data and possibly images over the Internet in the near future and the transmission speeds will increase.
 
USB (Universal Serial Bus) devices are now mainstream and several vendors were demonstrating the USB 2.0 devices that should appear early in 2001. The current USB data transfer is 12 Mbits while USB 2.0 specification is 480 Mbits. There were impressive demos with some running a DVD movie over the new standard and another DVD movie over the existing USB simultaneously on the same computer. The difference is very marked.
 
Another item that was missing was the CRT monitors. My estimate was that only about 5% of the stands had these while 95% used the flat panel monitors. Admittedly space is a very valuable commodity at the show so most chose to bring the low volume monitors but this is indicating a very strong trend as last year there would have been only 30-50% of these monitors present. As the prices of these will continue to drop and quality improves, we should start seeing these coming to the home user possibly within a year.

Another surprising group was, for me, the large number of biometrics security applications. All these vendors were exhibiting devices that will make passwords obsolete and were aimed at the financial and other security oriented sites. They were demonstrating iris scanners, fingerprint scanners, voice authentication, pressure signature pens and other devices. These will be mainly used for on-line financial transactions but some laptop computers have a fingerprint identification to cut down on theft.
 
Other items of interest were:

• DVD-RAM being aimed at the consumer market and a neat portable DVD player
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and eBusiness
• Video projectors that were approaching movie resolution

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