CeBIT at Hanover for all the gadgets you want to see

By Zatni Arbi

HANOVER, Germany (JP): Think of Comdex in Las Vegas as the Boeing 747 of computer expos, and guess which event should be considered the equivalent of the huge alien spacecraft in the science-fiction movie Independence Day? It must be the CeBIT in Hanover, Germany. No doubt about it.

With around 200,000 visitors, last year's Las Vegas' Comdex already felt colossal to me. However, CeBIT '97 dwarfed the event by recording around 6,800 exhibitors and 610,000 visitors. As reported by Handlesblatt, that came out one day after CeBIT '97 was over, during the week from March 13 to March 19 there were around 100,000 foreign visitors to the exhibitions. As many as 14,300 of them came from East European countries, 16,400 from the Asia-Pacific region, and only 5,200 from North America.

CeBIT covers the whole range of office, communication and information technologies. Understandably, the scope extends from banking to CAD/CAM to the retail industry.

CeBIT '97 was indeed a massive event. As expected, the booths of the big players in the information technology industry were packed. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Compaq, Siemens Nixdorf, Panasonic, Lotus, and even Symantec were all so crammed with people that they felt almost like the Blok M bus terminal during rush hour. Siemens Nixdorf, abbreviated as SNI, came in a very big way with a staff of 2,000 during the exhibition. That's not surprising, as Germany is their home market and they are the market leader there.

Interestingly, according to a survey conducted last year by U.S.-based Inteco Corp., 64 percent of the Germans who didn't yet have a home PC believed that they did not need one. The situation in other European countries was not much different, according to the Spring 1997 edition of the Wall Street Journal Europe's Convergence. This may soon change, as the cool home-PCs from Toshiba, Compaq and Siemens Nixdorf looked hard to resist and they were all exhibited.

What were the interesting things I saw during my brief visit here? A lot, of course, although I admit that I wish I could have spent the entire week to sift through the stands. In the exhibition booths I saw more PCs than I had seen at the Fall 1996 Comdex. There was a truly gorgeous one made by Siemens Nixdorf, called the MCF 33501 T. This flat screen comes with a special graphics card to handle digital signals for the fine pixels. Although it's only 13.8" in its diagonal dimension, it is comparable to a 17" CRT monitor with a resolution of 1024 by 768. At CeBIT '97, there were 43 exhibitors that showed off their flat panel screens, including ViewSonic, Taxan, Sharp, Mitsubishi, NEC, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, as well as my favorite EIZO.

Almost a year ago, a friend from SyQuest Technology International in Singapore had given me some preliminary information about their SyJet, a new removable drive with a one GB storage capacity that would compete head-to-head with Iomega's Jaz. I guess, because the company had been losing out to Iomega, they were forced to postpone the actual shipment of this product. The welcomed result was a 50 percent increase in capacity. SyJet can now store 1.5 GB instead of its initial specification.

According to an unofficial test report in this month's Byte, SyJet has a speed performance comparable to Jaz, and that's no surprise. At the moment, the SCSI version of the external and internal drive are already available, as well as the parallel port version of the external drive. The EDI version is coming later this year. It's great. Now we have these two competing companies entering the arena again and this will certainly mean lower prices for us.

TEAC makes one of the currently available 16 speed CD-ROM drives. By the way, in Glodok we can now find the 12 speed while the 8 speed is being phased out. According to the people in the CD-ROM drive industry, it's almost impossible to go faster than 18 or 20 speed. Yet there's no need to worry because 16 speed is certainly faster than what our applications normally require. Besides, DVD has already started to appear on the horizon with Phillips offering their first-generation internal DVD drive for your PC.

Talking about Phillips reminds me of a new format of compact disc that also contains text. At the Phillips' stand I saw the text displayed in a small monitor that sat on top of a mini compo. You can read all sorts of information about the artists, their back catalogs as well as other data while the compact disc is playing. You can even read the lyrics of the song that is displayed synchronously with the audio playback. It's not karaoke because it is a complete audio CD, but you can use the feature for this purpose anyway.

I got a pleasant surprise at Acer's stand, because this Taiwanese giant turned out to have gone into the peripheral business, too. One of its exotic keyboards, the Future, was particularly enticing. With a detachable numeric keypad, it looked somewhat like Microsoft's Natural keyboard but with more pleasing colors, shape and feel.

The cursor movement control keys (the arrow keys) are located right between the two space bars, making them so much easier to reach. You can opt for a touch pad version, which will be placed there instead of the cursor keys. Acer offers a raft of other keyboards, including a wireless infrared model. This company has entered the scanner market as well with its Vuego Scan 300F, a 300 DPI optical resolution scanner for everyday scanning. A transparency kit and an automatic document feeder are also available for this low-end scanner.

Panasonic was showing off their DVD initiatives. However, their most interesting product to me was their "ruggedized" notebook. Tugged inside a hard case made of magnesium alloy, this 100 MHz or 133 MHz Pentium notebook computer is vibration and shock resistant. The hard disk is mounted inside a shock absorbing material that allows a vertical motion of 10 mm.

Vibration dumping material is also inserted above and below the floppy disk drive. The LCD screen is also covered by a water- resistant surface, and so are the keyboard switches. The touch pad and the speakers are water-resistant as well. If you need a notebook that you can abuse, perhaps this Panasonic CF-25 is the best you can get. The price range, should you become curious, is DM 5,650 (about Rp 8 million) to DM 9,128, depending on the processor types and RAM sizes.

Asus is the largest maker of motherboards in Taiwan. Their new Asustek mainboards, the 430TX Smart Series, are loaded with new intelligent features, including support for MMX, SDRAM, UltraDMA/33, Concurrent PCI, ACPI-Ready, Soft-off, and PC '97. These boards are also smart enough to monitor the health condition of your PC.

They will monitor the fan status, the temperature inside the housing and the voltage. They also give you system resource alerts, hardware BIOS virus protection, CPU auto slow down, auto fan off, remote on, LCDM and switching voltage regulator. When used with an ATX power supply, their non-ATX versions will still allow you to shut down your PC using software because of the Soft-off feature. We'll have a closer look at each of these features in one of my next articles.

Unfortunately, the guy I spoke to at the Asus stand was a little arrogant and he said that their catalogs were only for their dealers.

There were many other mainboard vendors as well, both from the U.S. and Taiwan. Biostar also showed their Pentium Pro motherboards for speeds ranging from 150 MHz to 233 MHz. Hm, I don't know whether Intel has released its 233 MHz Pentium Pro processor. At any rate, this motherboard maker has apparently geared itself up for the next step in processor speed race.

With the current influx of video-conference systems everywhere, desktop video cameras are a natural big thing at any computer exhibition, CeBIT '97 included. I saw video cameras from Phillips, Siemens Nixdorf and Toshiba. Toshiba's lightweight camera will use a PC Card, so that you can integrate it into your notebook.

An interesting technology was shown by XSYS, a German company. This technology, called Total Digital Audio Solution, reminds me of my BBE Sound Maximizer. Based on Texas Instrument's DSP, this technology can be customized to meet your needs -- be it your car audio or PC-based entertainment. We can download programs to the device and we can control, for example, the speaker pre-equalization, 3-D sound separation, noise reduction, and even karaoke functions. The impact was dramatic, even though the demo I saw made use of a pair of cheap computer speakers.

Digital cameras

Olympus has always been another favorite company in my list. They have interesting gadgets, including a head-mounted video monitor and three digital cameras. They claimed that their high- end DM 1,998 C-800L digital camera produced the best digital image on the market today. Called Camedia, it has a 6 MB storage capacity, which will allow you to store 30 of the best quality (1024 by 768) shots. It also has an auto-focus, Olympus 5mm F2.8 lens and a multifunction flash. You can select your frame through a 4.5cm color LCD monitor before you shoot.

Hard disks from Quantum grow bigger and bigger (the biggest is 9.1 GB). Today, five different classes of their hard disks are available. The Quantum Pioneer is for budget PCs. For mainstream users, the Fireball is still the right choice, while for storage intensive application the Bigfoot is the most cost-efficient one. For high-end PCs and servers the choice will be the Viking, while for audio-video recording you will need the Atlas II. Both Atlas II and Viking use UltraSCSI interface.

Toshiba comes with a new Portege that you might have seen at JACEX '97. I missed this computer expo in Jakarta, but I was informed by a colleague about the beautiful subnotebook. I had the chance to see it for myself here at CeBIT, but I find the palm-top Toshiba notebook more interesting. The Libretto 30 and 50, so they were called, weigh only 840 grams but are full- featured Win 95 machines. With a 75 MHz Pentium processor, they come complete with even an infrared port and a PC Card slot. Toshiba is planning to introduce this miniature subnotebook in other parts of the world this year.

Finally, if you think the present mouse is too big or too small for your palm, take heart. The maker of Contour Mouse has realized that one size doesn't necessarily fit all. If you're a PC user, you can choose between their Extra Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large mice. I tried the last one, and I really liked it. Mac users can choose between three sizes, and there are also models for the left-handed people. With one of these large rodent sitting on your desktop, your cat will perhaps decide to stay away from your study.

During CeBIT '97, PT Produksi Indonesia also had an exhibition representing six leading Indonesian technology companies. Sadly, their large stand was manned by some people who preferred to stay inside the rooms, so visitors were mostly served by a video featuring the production of Batik clothes.

Even now, I still cannot help asking myself why we should rent such a big and expensive exhibition stand in this Hanover Fairground only to provide such scant information about Indonesia.