Gadgets that deliver movies, digital music, and photos on the go. Boxes that shuttle entertainment from the home PC to the living room TV. Streaming data on a wristwatch. Judging by the crop of gizmos about to hit store shelves, the emphasis will be on "personal" when it comes to personal tech in 2004. Products and services announced at last week's Consumer Electronics Show and Macworld highlighted two themes: portable digital multimedia players and devices that link the home PC to entertainment systems throughout the house.

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Some of these products you'll find on sale now, others are slated for rollout later in the year. Here's a sampling.

Personal Media Players On the heels of the craze for portable digital music players a new crop of hand-held devices will be aiming to deliver it all: digital music, movies, recorded TV, and photos from a single device.

Microsoft calls its version "Portable Media Centers" and showed off the first units created in conjunction with Creative Labs at CES last week. They're expected to be delivered later this year. Other devices are being developed by iRiver, Samsung, and Sanyo.

Creative's entry, which has a high-resolution color screen, stores and plays digital video, music, and photos using a specialized version of Windows to handle the tasks.

Microsoft claims the device will hold up to 600 hours of audio in Windows Media format, 175 hours of video, and up to 10,000 photos. The idea is that you'll do things like record a TV show using your Microsoft Media Center PC and download it to your Portable Media Center to watch on the go.

Microsoft also has been busy cutting deals with companies to deliver content for the Portable Media Centers, such as Cinemanow

.com, which will offer feature films for rent or "download-to-own," and Napster, the online music store purveyor. The handheld multimedia player concept is not exactly new. Those already on the market include the Archos AV300 series ($550-$900), the RCA Lyra Audio/Video Jukebox ($400), and Handheld's affordably priced ZVUE ($99).

Sony is promising a device for later this year called the Location Free Portable Broadband TV. It consists of a 12-inch wireless touch-screen LCD monitor and wireless base station. In addition to offering TV, it can browse the Web, check e-mail, and show photos without a PC.

Game machines aren't exempt from all of this Swiss-army-knife thinking, either. Something called the Gametrac also debuted at CES. It's being billed as a "multifunctional entertainment device" that operates as a movie player, MP3 player, and digital camera. It uses Bluetooth and GPRS technology for multiplayer gaming. No word on when it will hit the United States, but units are expected to ship in the United Kingdom later this year.

It'll be interesting to see how single-function devices fare as portable multimedia players proliferate. Apple's new mini iPods, announced last week, are priced to sell. But Epson might want to rethink charging $600 for its P-1000 Photo Viewer, a hand-held digital photo storage and display device that's been selling overseas. It's due out in the United States later this month. The P-1000 comes with a 3.8-inch color LCD screen, a 10GB hard drive, and a built-in slot for CompactFlash Type I and II and IBM Microdrive memory cards (an optional adapter hooks it up to Memory Stick, Smart Media and other formats). Nice, but a little ho-hum and pricey in light of recent developments.

See SPOT finally run Forget information at your fingertips. Microsoft says it's ready to slap data onto your wrist with a new line of watches based on Smart Personal Objects Technology.

The so-called smart watches made by Fossil and Suunto automatically stream data such as news, weather, stock quotes and instant messages via MSN Direct, a companion Internet service. Users can customize content delivered to the watch online. Apparently they also connect to Microsoft Outlook and can display appointment reminders and change time zone and weather forecasts when you're traveling.

SPOT watches, from $129 to $299, will be available through the manufacturers' websites, at Amazon.com, and at major retailers. MSN Direct costs $9.95 per month or $59 annually.

Media everywhere Microsoft's not the only company intent on invading your living room. There's been a lot of buzz about how consumers want to move their digital media beyond the PC. Hence the onslaught of products aimed at making your home computer talk to your TV, your stereo, and other entertainment systems in any part of the house.

Netgear will offer the Super Wireless Media Router, which will facilitate sharing video, digital music, and photos over your home network and will probably sell for under $200. Also for under $200, the MP101 Wireless Digital Music Player will play music from your PC over your stereo as well as stream Net radio. It'll be available next month.

And of course, Microsoft is looking to cash in with its new Windows Media Center Extender, which turns Media Center PCs into entertainment sharing hubs as well. The Xbox Media Center Extender Kit lets users tap into music, recorded TV, and digital photos from their PC using the Xbox.

Virtual hunt and peck Tired of poking at tiny onscreen keys or toting around a foldout keyboard to enter text into your PDA? In the "now for something completely different" category, a company called iBiz plans to release a "Virtual Laser Keyboard" for PocketPC and Palm PDAs.

Yes, virtual. This gizmo projects a laser image of a full-size keyboard onto any flat surface. To type, you tap on the image, which is reflected back to the PDA via a tiny camera embedded in the device. It's purported to even make keyboard tapping sounds.

The $99 device, which also works with laptops and desktop PCs, is due out in the first half of 2004. A version for cellphones somes later this year. Several other companies are working on similar laser projection products.

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/01/12/multimedia_gadgets_get_personal/

but the title is definitally misleading..

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Originally posted by glassman:
Look at the letters in the new members name they all appear in the authors name too

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Originally posted by glassman:
New member I meant no disrespect-- The article is not dishonest-- we do our DD here so help us out if you have a tip. if you are the author and you write frequently we would surely appreciate a heads up. It did look like you were telling us Mr. Gates was interested in IBZT-- We all sometimes mispeak.

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has anyone found out when the ces awards come out? that could be a banner day for ibzt.

uncle milty[/B]

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The awards have already been presented, and unfortunately iBiz didn't walk with anything except whatever press they got from being a finalist.

Didn't seem to be any cutting edge technology(from the few I checked) in the Finalist list, just continuation of things already out there(flat speaker wire, A/B switch for phone and music.)