Wireless connectivity, convergence will be biggies

By John Yaukey and Greg Wright
Gannett News Service

Is this the year you'll go wireless?

Perhaps you'll tune into satellite radio.

Maybe you'd like to have your e-mail read to you through a voice-activated cell phone while you drive or have directions softly spoken to you from your personal digital assistant (PDA). Or are the events of Sept. 11 and all the news about viruses and hackers making you hanker for electronics that offer security?

These are some of the top technologies — many already available to consumers — poised to bloom in 2002. And by that we mean ready for prime time — purged of technological gremlins and priced for average consumers.

If you've been eyeing them from a distance, perhaps it's a good time to get to know them a little better.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth. Sure, you've heard it before: Bluetooth, the short-range wireless technology, is about to move into a broad range of popular consumer products.

While that may still be a bit of an exaggeration, Bluetooth is making notable strides into the mainstream, and will continue to do so this year. Bluetooth is a radio-based system that allows desktop computers, laptops, PDAs, cell phones and other devices to talk to each other — automatically and without wires.

Imagine your PDA automatically updating the phone list in your PC. How about a cell phone that knows to check your handheld's schedule and switch into vibrate mode during your daughter's violin recital?

Bluetooth has been talked about for a couple of years, but engineers had to work out the bugs and reduce costs before it became commercially viable.

At the heart of the technology is a microchip containing a radio module capable of communicating point-to-point or from one point to several, such as from a laptop to a small fleet of handheld devices as far as 30 feet away.

The idea is to create small local networks that are always on and always exchanging data in a way that simplifies life.

Microsoft this year plans to update its new Windows XP operating system with support for Bluetooth while several major consumer electronics companies plan to hit shelves with Bluetooth-enabled products or have already.

The new Toshiba Portege 4000 series laptops ($2,100-$2,550, www.toshiba.com) and the Tecra 9000 series ($2,500-$4,000) both come with built-in Bluetooth support as do IBM's ThinkPad A30 series notebooks.

Hewlett-Packard's recently introduced DeskJet 995C (www.hp.com, $395) was the first personal inkjet printer to offer wireless printing via Bluetooth.

Compaq's iPAQ H3870 pocket PC ($649, www.compaq.com) comes with a Bluetooth transceiver while Compaq also makes a Bluetooth conversion kit for earlier iPAQs ($159).

Satellite radio

Satellite radio premiered only late last year, but it made quite a splash.

Fortune magazine named XM Satellite Radio — one of two companies with plans to offer nationwide service — its product of the year in 2001, so this is a service you're likely to hear a lot about this year.

XM delivers 100 channels of music, news, sports and entertainment radio programming across the entire continental United States. That means you can listen to the same country, classical, rock or hip-hop station nonstop from the Outer Banks to Puget Sound.

The Washington, D.C.-based service (www.xmradio.com) offers 71 music channels, more than 30 of them commercial-free, and 29 channels of sports, talk, children's and entertainment, all for $9.99 a month. Some stations contain advertising.

Starting Feb. 14, XM's competition, Sirius Satellite Radio (www.siriusradio.com) will begin its national rollout.

Sirius will also broadcast 100 channels of digital quality satellite radio throughout the continental United States, but for the slightly more expensive monthly subscription fee of $12.95.

Satellite receiver-equipped radios for both services run about $250-$300.

XM satellite radios made by Pioneer and Sony are available at major electronics retailers including Best Buy, Circuit City, Tweeter, participating RadioShack dealers and franchisees, Crutchfield, Good Guys, CarToys, Audio Express and Sound Advice.

Fewer wires

Think the Internet is everywhere? In 2002, wireless connections to the Web might become a standard offering at some restaurants, gas stations and convenience stores, said Egil Juliussen, president of eTForecasts, a technology forecasting company in Buffalo Grove, Ill.

Wi-Fi technology, also known by the technical moniker 802.11b, lets PC, Macintosh, laptop and PDA users connect to other computers and the Internet through radio waves. Americans snapped up more than $44 million worth of Wi-Fi devices in 2001, an almost ninefold increase from 2000.

Starbucks coffee shops (www. starbucks.com) finished testing Wi-Fi networks in 500 locations across the country last year so laptop and Pocket PC users can browse the Web while sipping latte. And both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X are designed to take advantage of wireless networking.

Video game consoles and televisions that can play movies and music videos streamed directly over wireless Internet connections might also come to the fore next year, analysts said.

Companies such as TDK (www.tdk.com) are developing wireless video products for release in 2002 and the Seattle/Tacoma airport offers Wi-Fi connections to passengers. Even universities are starting to get into the act — the entire Carnegie-Mellon University campus in Pittsburgh has Wi-Fi.

"It has done extremely well already I would say," Juliussen said.

Convergence gear

Consumers are so loaded up on electronics — PDAs, pagers, cell phones and GameBoys — that Levi Strauss & Co. released Dockers pants in 2001 with extra, hidden pockets to hold all the stuff.

But a new generation of so-called "convergence" consumer electronic products that combine more than one technology in a single device could become more popular in 2002.

"It makes sense to have some convergence to reduce the amount of hardware consumers have to carry around," said Sean Wargo, senior industry analyst at the Consumer Electronics Association in Arlington, Va.

Handspring (www.handspring.com) plans to sell the Treo 180 in 2002. The $399 device is a cell phone and Palm PDA in one that also lets users browse the Web and send short text messages and e-mail. And Nokia (www.nokia.com) will release the Nokia 7650, a Web-enabled phone that also takes digital pictures at 640 by 480 pixel resolution.

Convergence gear is showing up on more than portable devices. Sony is already selling the $2,800 Vaio MX (www.sonystyle.com/vaio/mx), a 1.7 gigahertz, Pentium 4 processor desktop computer with built-in TV tuner card, DVD player, FM radio and digital TV recorder.

With its 80 gigabyte hard drive, the Vaio can record up to 100 hours of television, said Sony spokeswoman Valerie Motis.

Origami, a prototype device from National Semiconductor in Santa Clara, Calif. (www.national.com), is another piece of convergence gear that's getting a lot of buzz. The elegant, 7 1/2-inch unit, which folds like the Japanese paper art it is named for, can be used as a digital camera, video camcorder, cell phone, MP3 audio player, or PDA with Internet access, e-mail and video conferencing.

The only drawback of convergence devices is that they tend to be bulky, especially PDA-cell phone combinations, Wargo said: "Sometimes the screen size on these devices is so large it makes them larger than cell phones."