This article may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist. To maintain the flow of the article, we've left these URLs in the text, but disabled the links.

flux@microsoft.com

Douglas Boling

Comdex, don’t ya just love it?

kay, I'm different. I like Comdex. Especially the Fall variety in Las Vegas. Sure, the show is huge, the crowds are unbearable for most of the day, and the lack of taxi cabs is annoying. Still, there is something comforting about returning to all these things year after year. It has become some sort of an annual pilgrimage for me. The Big Shot on top of the Stratosphere. Eric's special slot machine in the Mirage. And this year's new attraction, the roller coaster in New York, New York.       Still, the coolest things are the people and the products. Comdex is, as has often been said, a giant shmooze-fest. You see folks you simply don't get a chance to see during the rest of the year. And, since everyone is in the same place, you can set up meetings of people who are never in the same place at the same time. Comdex is like a giant county fair for nerds.       It's also fun to check out the latest products. Some, like the Mitsubishi Pedion notebook, I had read about but not seen. It's a notebook computer that weighs 3.1 pounds, is less than 3/4 of an inch thick, and has a 233MHz Pentium. Sounds great. Unfortunately, it misses the mark up close. I guess I'm picky, but I expect more than a Chiclet-studded keyboard from a $5,000 notebook. It may be a large Chiclet keyboard, but it just doesn't have the proper feel for this non-touch typist. I'd rather have an IBM 560. It is a bit thicker, but it has a great keyboard.       While walking the floor, you could not help but notice the amazing number of flat-panel displays being shown everywhere. These things have outgrown the notebook computers—though no one has told the notebook manufacturers who, ironically, keep growing their laptops in a vain attempt to keep pace with these ever-larger displays.       It'd be nice if someone would just put a smaller but good screen on a lightweight, thin notebook with a nice keyboard. Oh, and please provide more than a couple of hours on the battery. Maybe even 12 to 16 hours on that battery for the Trans-Pac traveler or the guy who forgets to charge the battery every once in a while. Trust me, it'll happen. And sooner than you might think.       Although cost is still an issue, the 15-inch flat panels for the desktop are looking better and better. With the extreme sharpness of an active TFT display, you don't need to match either the size or the resolution of a video monitor. The 800 X 600 12.1-inch display on my Dell laptop is as good as a 1024 X 768 monitor. Imagine what one of these 1024 X 768, 15-inch TFT displays looks like.       Another interesting trend is the growth in alternative storage media. PCMCIA flash memory cards are all now standardized on an ATA (hard disk-like) interface, eliminating the need for special drivers. The capacities of these cards have also taken an amazing turn. SanDisk was showing PCMCIA flash cards with 500MB of storage. Amazing! It looks like that 16GB smart card I've been wanting is just around the corner.       Compact Flash cards are also growing. The Compact Flash form factor looks like a half-length PCMCIA card. In fact, electronically the Compact Flash interface is pretty close to the PCMCIA interface. SanDisk was showing 60MB Compact Flash cards that may be available in the first quarter of 1998. That is a three-fold increase over their current 20MB cards.       Not to be outdone in the small storage department, Iomega introduced its Click drive. This is a tiny floppy disk that's smaller than a PCMCIA card. The disks hold 20MB of storage. I'm not sure about the future of this product. Sure, it's small, but the battery power required to move rotational media is high. Power is critical, especially in the target market for these drives: PDAs and digital cameras. Another annoying factor was the stupid clicker things the folks in the Iomega booth were handing out. Remember those metal cricket clickers you had as a kid? These things were annoyingly clicking all over the show floor.       For PDA fans there were a few interesting items at Comdex. Hardware manufacturers working with Microsoft introduced new PDAs running Windows® CE 2.0. Even though Windows CE 2.0 was introduced a month or so earlier at the embedded systems conference, this was the first time users had a chance to handle the new and improved hardware and the new suite of pocket apps from Microsoft. HP, NEC, and Sharp all showed 640 X 240 color PDAs with others promising the same soon. Yes, I said Sharp, which had a somewhat schizophrenic booth with their Wizard PDA line on one side and their Windows CE boxes on the other.       Aside from my total state of exhaustion on returning from Comdex, the only regret I have each year is not seeing all the cool stuff. I always hear about great products I should have seen from Neil Rubenking, the PC Magazine Technical Editor who is an absolute zealot about walking every inch of the show floor. Oh, to have that kind of stamina. He told me about this amazing feedback mouse that actually makes you feel like you're moving the mouse over different textures as you move from window to window on the screen. Next year I'll have to sit down with Neil before my last night in Vegas.

From the February 1998 issue of Microsoft Interactive Developer.