Digital Home Thoughts: CeBIT America 2004: Exploring The Show Floor

Figures 11-13: Gabrielor's new keypad in a variety of prototype form factors.

A new company called Gabrielor was showing off prototypes of their new one-handed "Rounded Keypad" technology. The idea is to efficiently pack an entire alphabetic keyboard, so that one can avoid multitap or T9-style solutions on their phone, data entry unit, or other compact/mobile device. The prototypes didn't have tactile feedback, so it's difficult to judge how well this is going to work.


Figure 14: Synet Electronics' video software.

Several booths later, we came to the Synet Electronics booth, where they were highlighting security and video software. Secure Send and PC-Keeper enable the securing of data and PC sharing, respectively; you can get more information from this Yahoo! article. Of more interest was their Video Editor and Video-to-DVD products -- video editing and burning software designed for beginners. They claim that Video Editor has a gentler learning curve compared to software like Premiere, but with a similar featureset. Video Editor also offers integrated CD/DVD burning to enable you to burn your edited videos straight to disk. It is available now for around $69. Video-to-DVD, meanwhile, is a DVD authoring/burning software that also looked cool. We did not get a chance to look at the software in detail, but Suhit is hoping to get a demo copy and further information for the Digital Media Thoughts community.

We then passed a number of booths featuring various countries, looking for potential investors. CeBIT had a number of these, presumably to attract people to their countries for outsourcing and other services.




Figures 15, 16: Foxda's mini flash players.

Foxda displayed miniature Personal Music Players. These units are USB 1.1 devices with 128MB of capacity. Their impressive features include the size (note the earbud for a sense of scale), good battery life according to the representative and low cost (although we were unable to obtain specific numbers).






Figures 17-19: ElectroVaya's Tablet PC and PowerPads.

Electrovaya, the battery specialists, had a booth where they were featuring off their new Tablet PC designed, unsurprisingly, with battery life in mind. The rep claimed that the device was designed for a full day's use (e.g., 6-9 hours) with Wi-Fi on, which would easily trump most Tablet PCs on the market today (and would perhaps make for a great complement to a Wi-Fi enabled trans-Atlantic flight!). They also had their popular PowerPad 120 and PowerPad 160 accessories for existing laptop and tablet PCs -- they're designed to sit underneath the laptop, on your lap, and can increase battery life tremendously. It's good to see there's at least one company out there working on practical solutions to the battery life problem.






Figures 20-22: Mitsubishi's rear-projection display technology -- a single screen closed, opened, and 6 screens tiled.

Just like last year, Mitsubishi was showing off their $20,000 rear projection DLP 50" display. The shots above show the unit and its innards, respectively; the screen is mounted on hinges to enable easy opening and maintenance. Thanks to the fact that their technology goes to the very edge of the screen, it's relatively straightforward to assemble a set of 6 tiled together to make the ideal screen -- for the low, low price of $120,000. 8O The individual units are also capable of high-definition, but the card to support the functionality costs somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000. Despite Suhit's repeated attempts to convince them that they need to develop a $5,000 solution to bring this to the mass market, the Mitsubishi folks insisted that they're focusing on the professional/business/military market for now. Apparently, CentCom currently uses these kinds of displays.


Figure 23: Kati and Suhit enjoying a little air, thanks to APC.

APC had some of their top-of-the-end racks with comprehensive cooling systems at their booth. Since the racks were empty, these were tantamount to the ultimate in fan technology, and Janak quickly snapped a shot of the two of them getting a breath of "fresh air". ;) Suhit observed that the fans were creating their own localized "weather patterns" as can be witnessed by their hair.




Figures 24, 25: Epson's 4000 8-cartridge inkjet printer.

Suhit had a very disappointing experience at Epson's booth. Despite the fact that they were featuring the 4000 and 7600, Epson's representatives were rather unhelpful. When he went up to them to ask about more information on the 4000 and its 8-cartridge technology, they first shuttled him amongst the different representatives -- apparently it wasn't clear who was going to demo the product. They then scanned his badge and said more information would be mailed to him. Finally, when he started asking questions, he was just rudely handed a brochure. Clearly, they were not interested in selling their product and did not even attempt to make an effort. Ok, end of rant... Suhit'll have to continue waiting for reviews online to hear more about print quality, etc. :|