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

Next, we made a visit to the folks at OQO. They did not have a public booth, but rather a (little) meeting room, in which the three of us sat for about 45 minutes and had an opportunity to play with the devices. To get our full feedback, you'll want to check out our upcoming article; we present some pictures below to whet your appetite.






Figures 34-36: The OQO in its dock with the screen expanded, the OQO with the screen retracted alongside the iPAQ 2215 and Toshiba e805, and the OQO expanded next to the e805 running in landscape mode.




Figures 37, 38: HP's ultraportable DeskJet 450 Bluetooth printer.

Next up was HP. As Suhit pointed out in the previous article, HP wasn't announcing anything new. However, he did get a chance to see the HP DeskJet 450 -- the color inkjet printer that can be battery-powered and can communicate over Bluetooth. This looks like an excellent solution for a wireless printing solution. HP claims that the battery lasts for approximately 300 pages of printing, and you can send data to the printer from your PDA or laptop via Bluetooth.

While Microsoft's main booth was devoted to CRM and other "enterprise" applications, and thereby was devoid of gadgets, Microsoft did have a MSN SPOT watch booth. Unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures; instead, the SPOT folks took pictures of Suhit and Janak, because they were both wearing SPOT watches. ;) Kati was happy to hear that they're planning to make a slimmer "ladies" version of the watches, but given how large the existing ones are compared to her wrist, she's not sure how much smaller they can get.




Figures 39, 40: Yes, a consumer Breathalyzer! 8O

Our final discovery was a booth by some company that was selling a handheld consumerized Breathalyzer -- a pocket-sized devices to quickly check your alcohol level (after a party or some such) to see if it is safe to drive. Kati and Suhit decided to test their alcohol levels. Kati correctly got her result as 0.0, implying that she was completely sober. Suhit, on the other hand, registered a blood alcohol level of 0.2. 8O For those of you that don't know what that means, a BAC of 0.2 is beyond toxic (and Suhit hadn't even had a drink!). Seeing as how the legal limit for driving is a BAC of 0.08, he was half expecting the device to automatically call the cops and the ambulance simultaneously :).

As you can guess, the fact that we reported on a Breathalyzer unit implied that we walked away largely unimpressed by the number of vendors that showed up. Suhit lamented the lack of camera and imaging companies (some of which were present at last year's conference), and he didn't see any next-generation media drives like Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drives/disks. Meanwhile, handheld companies were not well-represented either; HP had their regular iPAQs, but nothing new was present, and the one highlight in terms of handheld computing was the OQO.

The expos seem to be getting sadder as the years go by; Janak thinks it's because of the proliferation of the Internet as a cheaper, more readily accessible marketing tool, thereby eliminating the need for large expos in the first place. Nevertheless, we can hope that next year's event is better.