TECHNOLOGY
The Wide World of Small
I found myself sitting down to dinner with strangers the other night, one
of whom, Tom, was passing around his latest gadget – a Handspring Treo
that included a wireless connection to the internet with a Blackberry style
keyboard for instant messaging. I wanted to be skeptical. It’s in my
nature. But the oohs and ahs from across the table made it clear Tom was a
man on the cutting edge of cool.
When Tom passed the device along to me, he asked what I did for a living. So I told him I just put up a website at www.theweekbehind.com.
“Let’s call it up,” he said.
With stylus in hand, he dialed in the site. And we waited. Tom explained that this Treo was slow because it is last year’s model. By Christmas, Handspring will have a new model that increases the download from a snail’s pace 9600 baud rate to the more standard dial-up 56K connection.
The wait gave me a chance to tell him about my new Palm Zaire m300 that not only works as a PDA but also takes instant pictures at a passable 640 X 480 pixel resolution.
Then he told me about a new AT&T cellphone that not only takes pictures, and connects wirelessly to the net, but also works as a PDA. And I told him about the new Nokia 3300 that not only works as a cell phone and PDA and connects to the internet, but plays back MP3 files in stereo.
Before he could name another gadget to top mine, I watched on the screen as my entire website appeared in full color. The site (largely made of graphics) appeared in pieces, but The Handspring apparently can parse the images and instantly resize them so, by clicking on the up, down and sideways buttons, you can clearly read the entire Week Behind on your wireless Handspring Treo.
“Which one do you want me to read?” he asked.
“I’d stay away from Dan About Town,” I said, “unless, of course, you’re looking to get laid.”
Navigating The Week Behind on his Handspring and realizing the new Nokia music phone was only the tip of the iceberg of things to come set me to googling in on this new wave of small screen devices. Sure enough, the Nokia 3300 is only a stutter step in the march of progress. This month, Nokia is promising to deliver a new Nokia 7600 cellphone that not only takes pictures, plays music (and makes telephone calls), but can record video you can playback or send by email to your best friends.
The impetus behind all this is a marvelous confluence of technology. New compression schemes (MPEG-4) and the rapid acceptance of something called WCDMA (essentially a low frequency wireless radio signal) as a standard for 3G or GSM telephonic communication is creating a revolution in communication.
This December, in parts of Japan (Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka) and Europe, they will be rolling out a TV broadcast service you can watch on your cellphone or Palm Pilot. It will be less than a year before you can reco rd and send up to 50 minutes of video from your cellphone. Music, still pictures, games and, of course, email are already a given.
Just when you think you finally have this internet figured out, there’s a new technology on the horizon that changes everything.
With all the billions of dollars being spent on high-definition television signals that, five years after their introduction, still require a $6,000 TV to watch, low-definition TV is sneaking into every aspect of our lives. The PT boats have beaten the battleships again.
And you know what? This stuff looks pretty good. There’s
nothing like the small screen experience.