[Janak Parekh]

Note to self: make sure never to start an article series the week before Pocket PC 2003 launches and two weeks before subscriber services launch. :lol: Sorry for the delay, but I've included almost 40 pictures over three pages in this second installment of the CeBIT America report, so hopefully that'll make up for it somewhat. Let the eye candy begin!


This is what the CeBIT keynote stage looked like. Those hardcore lava lamps were shifting around. A very neat effect.

An Administrative Note...
In case you're curious, we (that is, my colleague Suhit Gupta and myself) took these pictures with two cameras: a fairly pedestrian Canon PowerShot S230 (which I used) and a seriously powerful Canon EOS 10D (which Suhit is the very happy owner of). The S230 is a very decent three megapixel camera with macro mode, 2X zoom, but there is no comparing the superpower that the 10D represents. It's seven megapixel digital SLR, supports standard EF mount lenses, has insane battery life, and the manual takes about a week to read :lol: If you want to see what it's truly capable of, check out these hi-res shots of the Treo 600 and a NTT DoCoMo next-gen phone. (The Treo 600 was in a glass case, which made it a bit more complicated to shoot.) You've been warned -- the files are huge and break some browsers' image-scaling routines! Most of the other images are scaled-down to 1280x1024 (click on the thumbnails to see the full pictures).

Thoughts On The Floor
As I mentioned in Part 1, CeBIT was not heavily attended, and we were able to do a more-or-less full traversal of the floor in a few hours. If you've been never to Javits, it has an utterly bizarre and asymmetric layout. There are four parts to the main convention floor (level three), and I'd estimate that CeBIT took up about 60-70% of the entire third floor. The rest was just curtained away. It's a bit sad, as I remember the good old PC Expo days when the floor was completely filled to the edges. (We'll see what happens in PC Expo this fall, but that's a different story for another time.)

Productwise, CeBIT closely mirrors PC Expo: business-oriented technology solutions. About 30-40% of the booths have "interesting" technology items; many of the others are hawking software of various shapes and sizes. It's worth mentioning that Pocket PCs were virtually invisible in the show; if anything, it felt to me like Microsoft deliberately snubbed CeBIT by announcing Windows Mobile 2003 the week after instead of right at CeBIT, which might have given it more media coverage and made a nice counterpoint to David Nagel's PalmSource keynote.

As a result, I have a few pictures of Pocket PCs (in particular, the new Hitachi Pocket PC Phone), but that's about it. However, I had the opportunity to interview Mike Wehrs, Director of Standards for MS's Mobility Division, which will make up part three of this feature, so at least I didn't walk out completely empty-handed Pocket PC-wise.

Anyway, enough descriptions... on to the pictures!

Phones!
Mobile phone solutions are absolutely one of the hottest market industries right now, and it was therefore not all that surprising to see several booths hawking wireless technologies. We stopped in two in particular: the Sprint booth and the NTT DoCoMo booth.

Sprint PCS

Sprint's prime PDA phone lineup. From left to right, the Samsung SPH-i500, the Handspring Treo 270, and the new Hitachi G1000. The Toshiba 2032 and Samsung N400 are to the left.


A closer view of the Sprint PDA phones.

The Hitachi G1000 is a large device, no doubt about it -- and, despite how it looks, I didn't see a screen cover of any sort on it. However, it feels pretty nice in the hand, is surprisingly light given the size, and can be pocketed as long as you have a totally empty pocket -- and the idea of having an all-in-one device is tempting. Unfortunately, I lamely forgot to take a picture of the unit on (they had pulled the unit out from under the desk at the last minute), but the screen looked like standard transflective fare.

On the other extreme, the Samsung i500 Palm OS phone is small. It is very, very small. It is really close to the size of a Motorola StarTAC. While it won't satisfy my needs (a 160x160 display, no expansion or multimedia of any kind), I could easily see this become a mass-market PDA phone. I would love to see flip Pocket PC Phones, perhaps with a slightly smaller screen -- I think that's currently a missed opportunity, although the Samsung SCH-i600 Smartphone might be a worthy competitor, and perhaps more durable as well.


The SPH-i500 in my hand. It is extremely comfortable and light.


At the Palm booth, they had the SPH-i500 next to the Kyocera 7135. No size contest here!

NTT DoCoMo
And then, there was the NTT DoCoMo booth. Gaudy-colored in bright green... with phones to match. It's clear why they're so far ahead of us -- their phones are insane. Too bad none of them will work here, yet :cry:


Japanese phones are heavy on the twist; and this one has a digital camera in the spindle. I believe Samsung is developing some twist phones, but they're still rare in the US.


This sleek phone...


...rotates down to a very compact PDA shape. I love this form factor.


This phone has a huge screen...


...and yet, it flips down into such a compact size.


This is better known as the drool display. :lol:


Check out the FOMA SH2101V. Since the device itself is very HPC-like and would be awkward to talk on, they bundle a very sleek Bluetooth headset that works with the device -- complete with a display and control so you don't have to whip out the main device.


The Sigmarion III CE .Net wireless device, which we recently mentioned.


A closer look at its specs, in case you're curious.

But wait! We're not finished! Continue on to the next page...

[Janak Parekh]

Note to self: make sure never to start an article series the week before Pocket PC 2003 launches and two weeks before subscriber services launch. :lol: Sorry for the delay, but I've included almost 40 pictures over three pages in this second installment of the CeBIT America report, so hopefully that'll make up for it somewhat. Let the eye candy begin!


This is what the CeBIT keynote stage looked like. Those hardcore lava lamps were shifting around. A very neat effect.

An Administrative Note...
In case you're curious, we (that is, my colleague Suhit Gupta and myself) took these pictures with two cameras: a fairly pedestrian Canon PowerShot S230 (which I used) and a seriously powerful Canon EOS 10D (which Suhit is the very happy owner of). The S230 is a very decent three megapixel camera with macro mode, 2X zoom, but there is no comparing the superpower that the 10D represents. It's seven megapixel digital SLR, supports standard EF mount lenses, has insane battery life, and the manual takes about a week to read :lol: If you want to see what it's truly capable of, check out these hi-res shots of the Treo 600 and a NTT DoCoMo next-gen phone. (The Treo 600 was in a glass case, which made it a bit more complicated to shoot.) You've been warned -- the files are huge and break some browsers' image-scaling routines! Most of the other images are scaled-down to 1280x1024 (click on the thumbnails to see the full pictures).

Thoughts On The Floor
As I mentioned in Part 1, CeBIT was not heavily attended, and we were able to do a more-or-less full traversal of the floor in a few hours. If you've been never to Javits, it has an utterly bizarre and asymmetric layout. There are four parts to the main convention floor (level three), and I'd estimate that CeBIT took up about 60-70% of the entire third floor. The rest was just curtained away. It's a bit sad, as I remember the good old PC Expo days when the floor was completely filled to the edges. (We'll see what happens in PC Expo this fall, but that's a different story for another time.)

Productwise, CeBIT closely mirrors PC Expo: business-oriented technology solutions. About 30-40% of the booths have "interesting" technology items; many of the others are hawking software of various shapes and sizes. It's worth mentioning that Pocket PCs were virtually invisible in the show; if anything, it felt to me like Microsoft deliberately snubbed CeBIT by announcing Windows Mobile 2003 the week after instead of right at CeBIT, which might have given it more media coverage and made a nice counterpoint to David Nagel's PalmSource keynote.

As a result, I have a few pictures of Pocket PCs (in particular, the new Hitachi Pocket PC Phone), but that's about it. However, I had the opportunity to interview Mike Wehrs, Director of Standards for MS's Mobility Division, which will make up part three of this feature, so at least I didn't walk out completely empty-handed Pocket PC-wise.

Anyway, enough descriptions... on to the pictures!

Phones!
Mobile phone solutions are absolutely one of the hottest market industries right now, and it was therefore not all that surprising to see several booths hawking wireless technologies. We stopped in two in particular: the Sprint booth and the NTT DoCoMo booth.

Sprint PCS

Sprint's prime PDA phone lineup. From left to right, the Samsung SPH-i500, the Handspring Treo 270, and the new Hitachi G1000. The Toshiba 2032 and Samsung N400 are to the left.


A closer view of the Sprint PDA phones.

The Hitachi G1000 is a large device, no doubt about it -- and, despite how it looks, I didn't see a screen cover of any sort on it. However, it feels pretty nice in the hand, is surprisingly light given the size, and can be pocketed as long as you have a totally empty pocket -- and the idea of having an all-in-one device is tempting. Unfortunately, I lamely forgot to take a picture of the unit on (they had pulled the unit out from under the desk at the last minute), but the screen looked like standard transflective fare.

On the other extreme, the Samsung i500 Palm OS phone is small. It is very, very small. It is really close to the size of a Motorola StarTAC. While it won't satisfy my needs (a 160x160 display, no expansion or multimedia of any kind), I could easily see this become a mass-market PDA phone. I would love to see flip Pocket PC Phones, perhaps with a slightly smaller screen -- I think that's currently a missed opportunity, although the Samsung SCH-i600 Smartphone might be a worthy competitor, and perhaps more durable as well.


The SPH-i500 in my hand. It is extremely comfortable and light.


At the Palm booth, they had the SPH-i500 next to the Kyocera 7135. No size contest here!

NTT DoCoMo
And then, there was the NTT DoCoMo booth. Gaudy-colored in bright green... with phones to match. It's clear why they're so far ahead of us -- their phones are insane. Too bad none of them will work here, yet :cry:


Japanese phones are heavy on the twist; and this one has a digital camera in the spindle. I believe Samsung is developing some twist phones, but they're still rare in the US.


This sleek phone...


...rotates down to a very compact PDA shape. I love this form factor.


This phone has a huge screen...


...and yet, it flips down into such a compact size.


This is better known as the drool display. :lol:


Check out the FOMA SH2101V. Since the device itself is very HPC-like and would be awkward to talk on, they bundle a very sleek Bluetooth headset that works with the device -- complete with a display and control so you don't have to whip out the main device.


The Sigmarion III CE .Net wireless device, which we recently mentioned.


A closer look at its specs, in case you're curious.

But wait! We're not finished! Continue on to the next page...

[JMountford]

I would also Point out that the Cannon 10D is a clear Editor's pick in the August 2003 edition of Popular Science. I think I may have to look into learning photography now that digital has come so far.

[droppedd]

damn - the big pic of the DoCoMo phone is so high quality you can read the serial number off the bottom of it

Oh and by the way - nice mustache, Janak! :lol:

[Pat Logsdon]

Excellent review, Janak - can't wait for part 3! The screens look very intriguing - especially the DViT tech. 8)

The Javits DOES look weird. I'll be in NY in September and will probably attend the PC Expo, so I hope it gets better attendance than CeBit!

[beq]

Thanks Janak! BTW there are more of your photos from this Cebit listed on the bottom of the PPCT front page -- is it from this same post or from an earlier post? If the latter I don't seem to recall seeing it before. If the former, maybe the PPCT template is messing up and breaking the post into 2 sections?

[Janak Parekh]

Originally Posted by bitequator

Thanks Janak! BTW there are more of your photos from this Cebit listed on the bottom of the PPCT front page -- is it from this same post or from an earlier post? If the latter I don't seem to recall seeing it before. If the former, maybe the PPCT template is messing up and breaking the post into 2 sections?

If you reread this article, you'll see the links to the other "articles" right at the bottom of this one. Basically, the page break feature in the Thoughts Media Engine doesn't work, and I had to make separate articles for each page. (Is the link not obvious enough? Maybe I'll embolden it...)

--janak

[CTSLICK]

OOOOHHH Janak, I love that flip around form factor (the blue one in your pictures above). So many possibilities.

When you see the phones folks get to use in Europe and Asia it makes the US look like a mobile phone back-water. Very frustrating. What is it that keeps US mobile providers behind the cutting edge?

[Janak Parekh]

Originally Posted by CTSLICK

OOOOHHH Janak, I love that flip around form factor (the blue one in your pictures above). So many possibilities.

Yup.

When you see the phones folks get to use in Europe and Asia it makes the US look like a mobile phone back-water. Very frustrating. What is it that keeps US mobile providers behind the cutting edge?

Actually, these phones don't exist in Europe either; they're drooling over it just like we are. :lol:

You can get nearly any modern unlocked European GSM phone in the US just fine, as long as it supports the 1900MHz band and you have a GSM provider. The only problem we really have left (apart from coverage, multiple standards, etc.) is that the GSM providers here are fairly conservative as to what phones they'll adopt and display; all the other ones have to be gotten through third-parties.

--janak

[CTSLICK]

Originally Posted by Janak Parekh

You can get nearly any modern unlocked European GSM phone in the US just fine, as long as it supports the 1900MHz band and you have a GSM provider. The only problem we really have left (apart from coverage, multiple standards, etc.) is that the GSM providers here are fairly conservative as to what phones they'll adopt and display; all the other ones have to be gotten through third-parties.

--janak

I suppose you're right, there are plenty of European phones that I could get from a 3rd party. The problem with this is of course the cost. I would have never been able to afford my T68 had it not been heavily subsidized by T-Mobile-US. Sadly my income is no match for my gadget habit. :wink: So I am forced to be patient and wait for the US providers to get some better stuff.

[suhit]

BTW, for those that are not quite satisfied with the resolution of the images, I can provide you with the true 6.3MP version of those pics .

But one of my favorites is me with Janak and Phil