Fetish
Cellular Hybrid
The PDA meets the cell phone in the form of Simon, a handheld de-vice developed by IBM and sold by BellSouth Cellular. Simon features a cellular telephone with wireless messaging, paging, and two-way fax capabilities. Weighing in at under one pound, Simon sports a graphical user interface developed by IBM, includes a scheduler, a pen-based notepad, and cc:Mail client software. Simon also contains a PCMCIA slot, so to receive and display pages, you'll need to buy and insert a PCMCIA card. Less than US$1,000. (800) 746 6672, +1 (404) 604 6493.
Passel of Patents
You've got a great idea. You think it might be patentable. You could trudge over to a patent library, but that's way too time-consuming. You could do an online search, but that's pricey at 50 to 100 bucks a pop. If you're an idea factory, or interested in some of the best info-surfing available, you'll want Patent Scan Plus, a set of ten CD-ROMs with information on almost two million patent records spanning the past twenty years. This may well be the most significant body of information ever published in electronic format. US$5,000. +1 (617) 576 5747.
Never Get Up Again
If you subject yourself to long periods of day-time TV watching, you probably have lots of problems. One of them is that the sun glares across the screen as it moves across the sky during the day. It's hard to move the sun, so you have to move the screen. As if couch potatoes aren't lazy enough al-ready, now there's one less reason to get up from your seat. The Turn Vision is a motorized swivel stand for your TV that lets you use almost any remote control unit to turn your TV to the proper viewing angle. Available for 13- to 35-inch sets, its drive mechanism automatically turns off if it bumps up against something or someone while turning. US$195. +1 (619) 944 9900, fax +1 (619) 944 1260.
Muscle Wires
Inventors, hackers, and project freaks take note, Muscle Wires are in. When you apply electricity, Muscle Wires can move things without a motor. Muscle Wires are actually strands and springs composed of a special nickel-titanium alloy called nitinol, which changes its shape in response to differences in temperature. A small electric current causes Muscle Wires to heat and shrink. Turn off the current, and they expand. You can use them for just about anything, from making silent fans to lightweight, motorless walking robots. The project book includes instructions and ideas for every-thing from computer-con-trolled systems to movie effects. You can order a project book and hobbyist kit for US$59.95, or an R&D lab pack for US$249. (800) 374 5764, +1 (415) 455 9330.
Wired Workstation
Buying a high-powered multi-media workstation piece-by-piece can cost a bundle. When SGI introduced the $5,000 Indy, people jumped up and down with joy until they realized that they'd have to kick in another grand for a hard drive and at least $2,000 for a capture/compression card. But now there really is a fully-configured $5,000 multimedia workstation, and it comes from no less a contender than Sun Microsystems. The SPARCclassic M system includes 16 Mbyte RAM, a 15-inch color monitor, 200-Mbyte hard drive, CD-ROM drive, video camera, and real-time video capture/compression card, so you can conference over standard networks. And now that Adobe has a version of Photoshop for SPARC-stations, people can start jumping up and down again. +1 (415) 336 0979.
3-Pound Road Warrior
Portable computers are never portable enough. And if they are portable, they aren't powerful enough. Although it's not perfect, the best compromise so far is the OmniBook 425 from Hewlett-Packard. The 425, HP's newest portable (see WIRED 1.5, page 100 for review of 386-based OmniBook 300) has a 25-MHz 486 chip, which provides the punch for this almost pocket-sized system that weighs a mere 2.9 pounds and runs on four AA batteries. It includes a full-sized keyboard (!) and a clever pop-out mouse. Another amazing feature is that Word for Windows and Excel are built into ROM - just press a button and everything springs to life. US$2,125 with 40-Mbyte hard disk. (800) 443 1254, +1 (408) 738 8858.
No More TV Warp
If you move a powerful magnet over a television or computer screen, the image will distort hideously. I used to love doing that in science class, but it's not too great for my TV set or computer. I also happen to love music and like to have a set of nice speakers for both my TV and computer. But guess what's inside nice speakers? Powerful magnets that can really muck up a screen. B&W has come to the rescue with its 2000 series of loudspeakers, which offer the new zero magnetic field (ZMF) design. This technology eliminates image distortion on TVs and monitors no matter how close speakers are placed to the screen. They also sound great, thanks to a new baffle design that emerged from a massive CAD project at BMW. US$199-$549 per pair. (800) 370 3740, +1 (508) 664 2870.
Beyond Air Guitar
What a funky-looking guitar! Oh, it's not a guitar. It's The Key - a new "inter-active multimedia musical instrument," that folks with no musical chops can just pick up and start playing. The neck of The Key is actually a keyboard, and the body contains six "strummer veins" instead of strings. Strum it and The Key fills in the chords and makes you sound great. Even cooler is the ability to plug The Key into a standard VCR and use encoded music videos so you can play along with your favorite bands (CD-ROM and CD-I capabilities are in the works). The Key has a MIDI output for connecting to a sequencer. You'll have to wait a month or two for The Key to hit the stores, though, before you can kick out the jams. US$300-$400. +1 (516) 939 6116.
Sound Effects
Want to sound like Darth Vader or maybe Alvin the Chipmunk? Or take a sound signal and place it into the depths of a cathedral or the bathroom shower? You can do all that and lots more if you equip your recording studio with the way cool DP/4 parallel effects processor from the electronic music wizards at Ensoniq. This little black box contains four of Ensoniq's custom DSP chips - each one provides a separate channel of 24-bit audio effects. These chips enable you to do four different things to one sound signal, or one thing to four different sound signals, or anything in-between. The box comes loaded with 46 basic effects and 400 preset programs. You can program your own if you don't mind a lot of kludgey button pressing and dial tuning. US$1,495. (800) 553 5151, +1 (215) 647 3930.
Consolidate Your Zappers
Americans own almost 300 million handheld remote control units. That's more remotes in the US than people. Sure, some people don't have remotes, but then there are people like me with more than a dozen. The VCRPRO 4 is a universal remote control for TV sets, VCRs, cable TV converters, CD players, and other such devices. Not only does this cut down on clutter, it's also a good solution for that lost or broken remote control unit. And it simplifies recording programs, because it can control both the cable channel and the record functions of the VCR. US$79.99. +1 (216) 487 1110.
Local Color
Most color printers suck. Although 24-bit color scanners, display cards, and image software will let you scan in and play with photo-realistic images, your creative talent will emerge from a laser printer or color ink- jet printer looking terrible. The only way to get good color output is to use a dye-sublimation printer, which impregnates the paper with exact mixtures of primary colors to create printouts that look like photographs. The Proof Positive printer from SuperMac works with SuperMac's line of color display technology to yield such a high degree of color accuracy that it can be used as a color proofing system for professional publishing. Better yet, artists and photographers now have the means to produce high-quality output. US$8,995. +1 (408) 541 6100.
Slick Green Machine
It's small. It's sleek. It's cool. And it's environment-friendly. It's the APF4000 personal computer. Some-day, all computers will look more like this - a tiny foot-print on your desk and a flat panel color display. If you want the future today, you'll have to shell out a hefty $7K for this 66-MHz 486 with 32 Mbytes of RAM and a 10.4-inch flat panel screen, which can display photorealistic images. It qualifies for the EPA's Energy Star Pollution Preventer system, consuming less than 40 watts of energy. The flat panel color screen emits no radiation or EMI. And there's no fan, so you don't have to listen to that vacuum-cleaner sound that plagues many PCs. US$6,995. +1 (803) 244 4416.
