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Internet-centric consumer appliances fuel upturn?By Rick Merritt
A host of digital gadgets, a rising tide of consumer networks and the advent of new service concepts reminded show goers the industry has plenty of potential on the horizon, even though no one product stood out as a killer app and the immediate future still looks overcast at best.
In handhelds, Panasonic showed the Japanese knack for miniaturization at its best with a family of palm-sized recorders based on SD flash cards that can take pictures, record voice or play back MP3 or video files. The model SV-AV10 sports a 2-inch LCD and will sell for $399 with a 64-Mbyte SD card.
Sony announced a version of its Clie handheld based on the Palm OS that integrates a 2-Mpixel camera while Garmin International Inc. (Olathe, Kan.) integrated its global positioning satellite hardware and software into a Palm OS handheld.
For its part, Microsoft demonstrated a video, picture and audio player it called Media2Go. The handheld has a 4-inch screen and a 20-Gbyte hard disk and will ship this fall from companies including Samsung, Sanyo and Viewsonic.
Networked systems
One overriding theme for many consumer companies is the move to networked systems.
Panasonic promised to begin releasing a series of networked AV home systems in its 2004 fiscal year. Paul Liao, Panasonic's chief technologist in the United States, said it remains a challenge to find ways to build the value of networking into consumer devices when their prices are falling so quickly.
Nevertheless, most consumer executives said networking systems remains a top goal. "The real key to the future is a seamless network that is neither IT- nor AV-centric," said Fujio Nishida, chief executive of Sony Electronics Inc.
Following the trend, Pioneer announced its first networked home consumer system - a digital library to store and send music, photos and video using an Ethernet network.
Another hopeful theme from CES is that digital television could finally be poised to take off.
Sony and Pioneer pledged to release cable-ready digital TVs as early as September based on a recent agreement allowing consumer electronics companies to build cable tuners into their TVs. A spokesman for Zenith Electronics said the launch this spring of high-definition versions of ESPN and the Discovery Channel will bolster the uptake for cable-ready DTV sets Zenith will release within 18 months.
Two new service concepts emerged at CES that held out hopes for emerging markets at the high and low end.
Virtual community
There Inc.(Palo, Alto, Ca.) debuted a beta 3-D virtual community where users could create their own characters, meet others, play games, shop and more. The service is based on object-oriented code running in a 100-system distributed server farm hosted by AboveNet (San Jose, Calif.). The startup will provide a C++ interface this spring to let experienced individual programmers develop objects in the online world and work with a handful of professional developers later this year to extend the online world based on the company's application programming interface.
While other virtual communities such as Black Sun have failed to take off, There has recruited graphics chip maker ATI Technologies Inc. (Markham, Ontario) as a marketing partner in its effort. ATI will bundle the 60 Mbytes of There's client code in its retail graphics cards this fall when the service goes commercial and There will provide ATI's cards free to some subscribers to its service.
"This is the most important use of computers and communications. It gives us access to what could be the first mass market for 3-D graphics," said David Rolston, vice president of engineering for ATI.
Tom Melcher, chief executive of There, said online 3-D communities like There could stimulate slack demand for high-end PCs.
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