The next area that we explored involved a large group of booths of Korean vendors. This is were we found the most exciting devices of the whole show. 

The first item that caught our eye was the miBook from Hacker & Packers, Inc. This was a small slate like device that allows you to browse the web, e-mail and read electronic books. The screen was very nice and with an optional TV receiver card accessory could be used to watch TV. 

The next Korean booth had a unique wireless input device called the Unicon from Virtual Industrial Technology Institute Inc. The Unicon was a mouse that was also a  folding keyboard with a built-in trackball. The unit on display was definitely a prototype as it didn't have real keys for the keyboard section. I'm not sure if this product will ever see the light of day, but both Judie and I thought was pretty cool. 

Around the corner from that booth was another interesting device called the TopHead. This flat screen monitor from Tophead.com is being marketed as a "New PC Monitor with a separate screen atop" which is a "Content Delivering Platform". This monitor had a small screen on top of a normal sized screen. 

From what we could tell (due to a definite language barrier), the top screen was a 24 hour internet advertising portal-type screen, and the bottom screen was the actual page content display. This might be a way for those of us who don't want to pay the bucks for a flat-screen monitor to get one! :0P 

The next couple of booths really grabbed our attention and kept it for the rest of the show. The first booth was for a company called Milletech. The initial product that we saw was a wireless color webpad called the Jupiter. What was different about this device was the fact that it could have either WinCE 3.0 or Linux as the operating system. It used CDMA/GSM to connect to the web. It also had a PCMCIA slot.

This was a very interesting webpad, but a little bulky. It looked similar to the Rocket E-Book devices that are out, just wayyy more feature-filled.

Although this was a cool device, the next one we saw was the real attention grabber...

It was a color handheld that displayed the screen in landscape mode. The device was pretty long, but we were informed that it was actually the prototype for the PDA sitting next to it. As soon as we saw that PDA, we were hooked! 

The Triton pictured below on the right, was a very small landscape Handheld PC running WinCE 3.0. It was similar in size to the Casio E-500: Quite light weight and thin. The color display (which didn't photograph well) was the best small color display that we had EVER seen. It actually displayed a sharp and crisp 640 x 480. The left side of the unit which held the batteries gave the PDA a nice comfortable handle. 

It has been some time since I felt such a strong case of "gadget-lust", but I am telling you now - this PDA was worthy! All Julie and I could talk about was how badly we wanted to see this product actually come to the market. It looked and acted like a true mini version of Windows running on a PDA the size of a Pocket PC. One of the things that most impressed me was that it was actually working! Unlike some of the units we saw there, you could actually use this one - all of the features seemed to be in perfect order, and it didn't crash while I messed with it! The guy running the booth was very friendly, even through the language barrier, and he assured us that the Triton should be out sometime around July or August. If that is the case, I know what my next PDA will most likely be! 

Then we came across yet another Korean PDA manufacturer MIZI Research, Inc. They had 4 or 5 different color PDAs behind a glass counter. Unfortunately, none of the booth droids could speak English so it was difficult getting any real information from them. 

Like the other Korean PDAs that we mentioned above, these also had excellent displays that were higher resolution than current Pocket PCs that we are all familiar with. Several of them had built-in cameras.

Another important thing to point out is that these PDAs were running Linux as the operating system and the performance seemed pretty snappy. The unit pictured above with the Linux penguin is the EXILIEN. It is powered by the 206MHz StrongARM processor (same as the iPAQ), 32MB of memory, a PCMCIA type I/II slot and a SD/MMC card slot.

In case you haven't gathered by now, Linux was a huge presence at COMDEX. There were booths everywhere that catered to the Linux crowd...

The last Korean booth that we visited displayed several small MP3 players from a company called Digital Square. 

The unique thing about several of their MP3 players were that they would display the words of the song on a large LCD screen as the song played.

After we dragged ourselves away from the Korean booths, we ended up in the Biotech area. One display that we noticed had compact flash fingerprint readers for Pocket PCs by a company called Biocentric Solutions. There were even sleeves for the iPAQ with fingerprint readers embedded on the back.

This appears to be big business. COMDEX had an entire area with several vendors that had everything from retinal scanners to these fingerprint readers. Looks just like something out of James Bond...you have to wonder if someday we will be able to unlock our cars and drive away - by just by placing our thumb in a reader...

And last but not least, we were really intrigued by a funky web browser called CubicEye by a company named 2ce. What made this browser interesting was the fact that it let you see pages in a 3D cube type format that could be rotated as you clicked on the different screens.

If you were looking at one of the six (!) views of this browser, and saw something you wanted to look at in more detail, you could click on whatever browser you wanted to see and it would fill the screen. Personally, I thought it was very cool, and I am going to try the Beta.

In summary, Spring COMDEX 2001 was fun but it was quite a bit smaller than the last Spring Comdex show that I attended in 1999. Microsoft didn't have any presence there at all. Nor was Palm (although there was a VERY small Palm Solution Pavilion), Handspring, Compaq, Casio or Hewlett Packard. 

This was my first COMDEX, and although I was surprised that we saw everything before 2:00 pm, I was happy that I had been able to see first-hand some of the new technology that we'll be talking about in the next year!

Judie and I are looking forward to CES 2002!

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