A glimpse of the Comdex mega show

On my Comdex trips, I'm sometimes surprised by technology before I even get to Las Vegas. For example, in 1997 I was surprised at finding a (then novel) tiny CD-ROM inside the back cover of a new Tom Clancy paperback I picked up at the airport; it tied the novel `Politika: Power-Plays' into an Internet-based global multiplayer game-from which the book was actually written!

Especially back then, this was quite a twist. And this year as well, a pre-Comdex technology surprise happened again--this time even before I left home.

When I awoke in the wee hours of the morning to head for the airport, I called United at 800-241-6522 to make sure the flight was on time. Rather than waiting for an also-tired human, I chose to use their `up to the minute' (they promised) automated flight information service. I was reluctant, because I've used these systems before with other airlines and I must admit to some frustration with pedantic and slow touchtone phone trees. In this case though, I was very pleasantly surprised indeed. United has implemented a very good voice recognition and response

system which did a good job of recognizing spoken flight numbers and cities, and then rapidly returning just the information I needed. They also made it relatively easy to bounce around for more info. I don't know what technology they're using, but it felt very similar to the

TellMe service (800-555-TELL) that we've discussed before.

Comdex first impressions are always interesting, and with over one million square feet of formal show space (and more in individual hotel suites), Fall Comdex is well suited to its home in the City of Excess, Las Vegas. This year, my first, in-your-face impression was `Wireless,' and the rest of the week bore this out.

Comdex wasn't just about today's wireless data, but it held lots of hints of things to come, as illustrated by Ericsson's huge "3G" (Third Generation) wireless exhibit in a parking lot across from the show--they were demonstrating a working prototype 384 kilobits/second EDGE cellular data system.

Entering the show proper is, as always, an exercise in surviving the massive crowds, such as this sea of bodies converging on the entrance. As with every year in memory, the first sight to greet my eyes was the

World of Microsoft, where everything from the next Office to .NET and more were explained and demonstrated and discussed. 

The second sight to assail my eyes in Microsoft City was a huge area devoted to the Pocket PC, where I was proprietarily pleased to see a veritable sea of Compaq iPAQ handhelds being used to demonstrate the latest improvements to Microsoft's Pocket PC software, such as Windows Media Player's ability to play music and full color motion video in the palm of your hand.

The rogue wave

The few things I'd already seen quickly solidified into this Comdex's major theme. Although it's been a very long time since Las Vegas has

felt ocean tides, there seemed to be two massive wave systems ebbing and flowing and crashing across the show floor: 

1) people wanting to be ever-closer to their data, as demonstrated by pocket (and smaller) computers and other devices intended to

bring us data-on-the-go; and

2) wireless technologies, to make sure that these new devices can reach out to the greater world beyond our pockets and briefcases.

Comdex originally began as a `big iron' show, and over the years I've watched it turn first towards minicomputers, and later towards PCs.

But while PCs were still very evident throughout the show, they too have now slipped from its main focus.

The new focus, of wireless access by very personal information appliances, was most publicly solidified when Bill Gates introduced

Microsoft's prototype Tablet PC at his keynote. This 2.2-pound legal-sized tablet contains ten gigabytes of storage and 128 megabytes of memory, and this prototype was running early code for the Whistler version of Windows.

Of course, not every PDA-like device had a wireless connection, and there were certainly wireless devices that were not Personal Digital

Assistants. But of all the waves washing across the show floor, these two--personal data and wireless--kept building upon and reinforcing

each other to become the huge rogue wave of the show that towered above the rest.

Some caveats

Many of the things we'll see here are not, and will never be products, while others are or will shortly be a phone call or an e-commerce mouse click away. But recognize that this report is not about `recommendations'--the few minutes (at most) that I had to explore any of these things certainly didn't give me enough exposure to come to a personal yea or nay decision, and all this information is based on what the vendors had to show and say--sometimes a more careful investigation will yield other answers (and you may be hearing more about some of these products or ideas in the future.) So please take these sights and sounds of Comdex for what they are: one person's fleeting glimpses of where Convergence may be heading.

Jeffrey Harrow


Senior Consulting Engineer


(Technology and Corporate Development Group), Compaq


Note: This is an article from the `Rapidly Changing Face of Computing', a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey Harrow. More discussions around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them are available at

www.compaq.com/rcfoc. The writer's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Compaq. The RCFoC is copyright 2000, Compaq.