What's in Store for 2004--and Beyond

How will the PC change during the coming year? The next five years? We consult the experts and come up with answers.

In the future, Contributing Editor Daniel Tynan and Senior Associate Editor Seán Captain will be much older.

The hype is finally turning into reality. Over the next two years, you'll start to use "invisible" PCs small enough to fit inside a desk drawer, powered by chips that chew through massive files like cotton candy. You'll enjoy new wireless technologies that let you log on at blistering speeds from virtually anywhere. Living rooms will turn into digital entertainment dens, where you'll enjoy media streaming seamlessly from every source--broadcast TV, cable, satellite, and the Net. And you'll encounter strict security measures that some claim will make PCs hacker- and virus-proof, though at the cost of personal control.

But that's just the beginning. How about computer displays stitched onto your T-shirt, or immensely powerful processors with circuits smaller than a human chromosome? In five to ten years, these and many other far-out technologies may also come to pass.

Can this torrid pace of technological innovation possibly continue? To find out, we asked experts what the future holds in six key areas: graphics, processors and PCs, storage, communications, security, and entertainment. Their short answer? Count on it.

Display's the Thing

As monitor and graphics technologies continue to improve, you'll see increasingly realistic 3D images on flatter and brighter displays. The LCD is here to stay, folks. According to IDC, flat-panel display shipments will surpass those of tubes for the first time in 2004.

For PCs, the 17-inch LCD will be the sweet spot over the next few years, as prices drop below $300. But don't expect prices to sink much lower, or screens to get much bigger, warns Jon Peddie of Peddie Research. "LCD manufacturers make their lowest margins on desktop monitors," he says, "and the cost of making them will keep the bottom price around $250."

While there's still some room for innovation, most of the improvements will be internal, notes Peddie. For example, screens will run cooler and consume less power. The real action will be in home entertainment, as large-screen LCDs drop in price to compete with plasma and projection technologies.

Get the OLED Out

Potential rivals to the LCD's dominance may come from screens using Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLED, pronounced "oh-led"), which employ naturally luminous materials that are brighter and more energy-efficient than LCDs.

"OLED is the one flat-panel competitor that looks like it might challenge LCDs over a range of applications," says Ken Werner, editor of Information Display magazine.

Active-matrix OLED displays require complex internal electronics, making them more costly to build. But last May, Samsung SDI and Universal Display unveiled a prototype OLED using existing LCD manufacturing technology that may pave the way for mass production.

"It's very exciting," says Werner. "Down the line, we may be able to make an OLED comparable in price to an LCD."

While OLEDs have already begun to show up on cell phones and digital cameras, Werner believes the first OLED screens for notebooks won't emerge for at least two years.

Graphic Jams

When it comes to PC graphics, you'll see two divergent trends, say experts. As integrated graphics chips continue to replace graphics cards in a lot of low-end PCs, many users will experience "good-enough graphics," says Peddie, "which is fine for the majority of people, who use [mainly] Office apps."

Today about 55 percent of desktops use integrated graphics chips, says Peddie, a number unlikely to change in the near future. Most are made by Intel, which now ships more graphics processors than any other company.

"Over time we'll see integrated solutions incorporate more advanced features," says Dean McCarron, principal analyst for Mercury Research in Cave Creek, Arizona, "but they will always be lagging one or two generations behind stand-alone cards." For gamers and graphics professionals, however, a new generation of graphics processing units will take them into the stratosphere. The latest generation of GPUs will really shine in upcoming games such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 that take advantage of pixel- and vertex-shader programs to speed up rendering and create much more natural-looking 3D images.

But even today's fastest GPUs aren't enough. "Right now developers can write complex shaders that could bring your graphics hardware to its knees," says McCarron. "They're holding back the quality of the rendering so the apps are still usable."

In the next five years, you'll see much more complex and flexible GPUs running 16, 32, or 64 parallel graphics pipelines.

"Game developers will be able to get exactly what they want rendered on screen," McCarron adds. "That means a higher degree of realism, with a lot more experimentation and cool effects."

Page Turners

Looking further out, the world of graphics and displays begins to resemble the world of science fiction. Last spring E Ink demonstrated "electronic paper" (made on a thin, flexible steel foil) using capsules of black and white pigment that react to electrical charges. Apply a negative current to the capsule, and white particles rise to the surface; add a positive charge, and black particles form words and images.

The sheet, about the size of a PDA display, can be rolled into a 1-inch cylinder, and it sports a 96-pixel-per-inch resolution comparable to that of most handhelds. The first electronic books using such technology should be available by mid-2004, says Darren Bischoff, E Ink senior marketing manager.

LCDs With Eye-Popping Color

Bigger color swatch: Boosters say LED-based monitors cover a larger gamut than fluorescent-based LCDs and CRTs.

Today's best LCDs produce a depth of color about equal to that displayed by a CRT monitor. In 2004 you may see LCD monitors and TVs capable of achieving about a 45 percent wider color range, called a gamut. The result could be a boon for everyone from designers and photographers who demand precision in their work to home viewers who want to see cinematic color on their LCD TVs.

The trick is in replacing fluorescent backlights with light-emitting diodes. Proponents say that mixing the output from red, green, and blue LEDs produces a truer white backlight, which enables a wider color gamut.

NEC-Mitsubishi plans to launch a desktop monitor with LED backlighting in the second half of 2004. And Lumileds, one of the main suppliers of LEDs for backlights, says that you may see enhanced PC monitors from at least one other company and TVs from up to two manufacturers, by the end of 2004.

The same monitor produces deeper colors with an LED backlight (at right) than with a fluorescent backlight. However, proper calibration will be needed to ensure that the colors are not only more dramatic, but also more accurate.

Seán Captain

Inside the Box

Technology marches on, but some things never change. Take the chip wars, for example. Last fall AMD fired a shot across Intel's bow by shipping the first 64-bit computing platform for Windows desktops. (Apple beat AMD to market with its 64-bit G5 Power Macs in September.) The 2-GHz Athlon 64 can boost processor-intensive tasks like data encryption, 3D gaming, CAD, and content creation. But its power won't be truly felt until 64-bit versions of Windows XP and key applications arrive; at press time Microsoft announced that Windows XP 64 would be delayed until late 2004.

In response to AMD's move, Intel announced the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. The 3.2-GHz chip features a larger memory cache, an 800-MHz frontside bus for faster data transfer, and an additional 2MB of L3 cache. Like the Athlon 64, the Extreme chip is aimed at gamers and other performance junkies.

Later this year Intel will ship a new line of Pentium 4 chips, currently code-named Prescott. They'll be the first CPUs made with a new 90-nanometer fabrication process that creates circuits nearly 50 percent smaller than the ones inside today's P4s. (AMD and Transmeta also have 90nm chips in the works.) As circuits get smaller, chips can run at higher clock speeds and execute more instructions per second.

"The 130nm chips have begun to reach their limit at around 3.2 GHz," notes Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with research firm Insight 64. "Prescott should be able to get up to 4 GHz." The Prescott processor will also feature a larger on-chip cache, which will speed performance by reducing the CPU's need to access system memory.

Rumors abound that Tejas, Intel's successor to Prescott, will debut near the end of the year with speeds from 5 to 7 GHz, that it will feature laptop-like power-management features, and that it or Prescott will support 64-bit applications.

This year will also see faster memory chips, says Brookwood, as Double Data Rate 2 chips become available. DDR2 memory's data-transfer rate starts at 533 megabits per second (about 4.3 gigabits per second per memory module), 33 percent faster than first-generation DDRs. The chips will also be smaller, requiring less power than first-generation DDR. Hot on their heels will be DDR3, capable of moving data at 1.6 gbps (6.4 gbps per module) and already being tested by makers of high-end graphics cards.

Down the Road

Moore's law--the concept that chip performance will double every 18 months or so--is alive and well. Researchers are just beginning to build chips with circuits only 65nm wide, and IBM and AMD are among those working to develop a 45nm process. Intel envisions paring that to 22nm by the year 2011. But to get much smaller than 45nm, chip makers may have to adopt new methods.

Today's chips are created using ultraviolet lithography, which focuses light through lenses to carve circuit patterns into a silicon wafer. The smaller the wavelength, the smaller the circuit. By around 2009, chip makers will hit a physical limit on wavelength size and will switch to a process called Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography. Using xenon gas molecules and mirrors, EUVL can shrink circuits by a factor of 10.

But by 2013 the ability to improve performance by shrinking silicon will be nearing its end, says Jim Tully, chief of research for Gartner. "Vendors and immediate users of semiconductors must plan for the use of next-generation semiconductor technologies such as molecular transistors," he notes.

For example, researchers from UCLA and Hewlett-Packard have created molecules that can be turned "on" or "off" with minute amounts of current. Such molecules could be used as switches inside logic circuits to build infinitesimally small chips.

Hop on the PCI Express

Though chips will grow ever smaller and faster, some of the most compelling developments will take place in the pathways to and from those chips, says Peter Glaskowsky, editor of Microprocessor Report in San Jose, California.

The key to these changes is PCI Express, a faster way to shuttle data between system components that's due out later this year. Designed to replace the outdated PCI bus and the hodge-podge of different interconnects within each system, PCI Express is "the most radical redesign of the PC platform since the advent of the PCI bus in the early 1990s," says Glaskowsky.

For example, this new bus would replace AGP 8X slots and double the speed of graphics data flowing to and from system memory, enabling faster 3D gaming and smoother video editing. The high-speed connection would allow users to attach gigabit-speed ethernet cards for ultrafast networking, or to easily string together massive hard drives for terabytes of storage. Intel claims PCI Express could ultimately reach transfer rates of up to 80GB per second (AGP 8X cards currently max out around 2GB per second) and could support CPUs running at 10 GHz.

PCI Express will also allow users to connect their high-speed peripherals outside the box, à la USB or FireWire, says Insight 64's Brookwood, making for smaller computers. Coupled with Intel's new Balanced Technology Extended designs (see "Cooler and Quieter PCs"), PCI Express could help make your desktop machine invisible--hidden inside a desk or nestled within the LCD housing.

"The PCs we'll buy just three years from now will have features, user interfaces, and expansion options that are radically different from those in the systems we're using today," predicts Microprocessor Report's Glaskowsky.

Cooler and Quieter PCs

Everyone wants a PC with the power of a jet engine, but not with the noise of one. A new motherboard design called BTX promises to allow continued performance increases while requiring fewer noisy cooling fans. Most of today's desktops have motherboards with the ATX design Intel created in 1995. ATX places the processor far from the air intake, which was fine for 100-MHz CPUs that required only a heat sink for cooling. But it's a liability for today's multigigahertz chips, which demand not only their own cooling fans, but also PC cases with even more fans, and special ductwork, to get enough air.

The BTX design situates the processor at the front of the PC so that it is first in line for the cooling air, which then passes over the system chip set, the RAM, and the graphics card. This setup should cut the minimum number of noisy PC cooling fans in half--from four to two, says Intel. The arrangement also allows shorter wiring paths between key components, an increasingly important feature as memory, system, and peripheral bus speeds increase.

Intel expects to make its first BTX motherboards by mid-2004. Some other motherboard makers have expressed support for BTX, but they haven't committed to adopting it.

Seán Captain

A Drive to Succeed

In the future your hard drive may not pack a whole lot more data. But it will be faster and easier to use, thanks to Serial ATA drive interfaces that began appearing in systems last year. SATA drives are easier to install, have thinner cables, and boast data-transfer rates up to 50 percent faster than those of the fastest drives built on the parallel ATA standard that has been in use for more than a decade.

SATA drives will make up about 30 percent of desktop drives shipped in 2004 and about 70 percent in 2005, says Dave Reinsel, IDC storage research manager. "For the average PC user, Serial ATA means simplified cabling, a cooler-running PC, and no more worries about bandwidth bottlenecks," he says.

But while the drive technology is new, capacities won't change much right away. Typical desktop PCs will continue to ship with 60GB to 80GB drives next year--plenty for most users.

Drive Bay Packers

Though most consumers aren't clamoring for more storage, manufacturers continue to seek ways to build bigger drives.

"The two most promising technologies in the labs today are perpendicular recording and heat-assisted magnetic recording," says longtime storage analyst Jim Porter, principal at Disk/Trend.

Maxtor recently used perpendicular recording to store up to 175GB per hard-disk platter, surpassing today's maximum of 100GB. Instead of storing data by magnetically orienting the particles on the platter's surface longitudinally along a circular track (like laying bar magnets flat--some oriented north-south, others south-north--in a circle), this scheme magnetically orients the particles perpendicular to the drive's surface (like a circle of bar magnets standing on end). Perpendicular recording can pack data more densely, and could spawn drives of 700GB, or roughly double the current maximum, in two to three years.

Heat-assisted magnetic recording uses a more magnetically stable disk surface, allowing denser packing and increasing data stability. Normally this requires a stronger write head to orient the particles of the disk's surface. But HAMR drives use a laser to heat the spot being written to in order to make it easier to orient magnetically. Seagate has demonstrated HAMR technology that it claims could ultimately store 50 terabytes per square inch.

However, warns Porter, such technology could be five to ten years away. Data density is still growing at about 50 percent per year using less-costly, conventional techniques.

"The most important spec on any drive is price," says Porter. "None of this [new] technology will turn into products as long as manufacturers can produce conventional drives for less."

Windows: Longhorn

What OS will future PCs run? for a preview of Microsoft's Longhorn, click here.

Big Storage for Small Spaces

Iomega's DCT removable disc (left) and drive mechanism.

With handheld devices like digital cameras and music players proliferating, you can expect to see continued efforts to cram more data into smaller spaces. In mid 2004, for example, Iomega will introduce its DCT removable 1.8-inch drives. The drive mechanism is small enough to fit into a notebook PC Card; the individual discs, premiering at 1.5GB, will cost only about $10. Iomega expects the drives to appear in PC Card adapters, USB key chain (thumb) drives, MP3 players, and digital still and video cameras.

While those Iomega drives spin up, flash-memory competitors will not be standing still. SD cards, now at 1GB, will hit 2GB by the middle of 2004. You could shoot a day's worth of high-resolution digital photos without changing cards on your ultrasmall camera. And some companies are substituting SD for comparatively gargantuan MiniDV tapes to build camcorders about the size of an IPod, such as the Panasonic SV-AV100 D-snap.

Seán Captain

Go Mobile, Stay Connected

Though DSL and cable modem connections continue to increase, your Internet experience will become more and more mobile, as laptops, handhelds, and cell phones reach out and connect from virtually anywhere.

For most users the choice will be speed versus availability, says Adam Zawel, Yankee Group analyst. Will you hook up through a low-bandwidth but ubiquitous cellular connection, or will you hunt down a Wi-Fi hot spot and log on at broadband speeds? "Ideally, you'd have both options, so you can connect to the fastest network that's available to you," he says.

For the short term, 802.11 (or Wi-Fi) local-area networks will dominate. Wi-Fi LANs are easily fast enough to handle cable or DSL. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, the number of 802.11-ready devices will climb from around 25 million in 2003 to 60 million in 2007; public Wi-Fi access points (hot spots) will climb from about 30,000 to nearly 150,000, says In-stat/MDR.

You soon may be able to enjoy high-speed connections while moving at high speeds: NEC recently demonstrated technology that allowed a test user to switch seamlessly from one 802.11 network to another in a Porsche traveling 205 mph.

Starting in 2005, WiMax networks based on the 802.16a spec will start to appear (see "WiMax: Wireless on Steroids" below). "We see 802.16 as a kind of silver bullet--it gives you the range of a wide-area network with the throughput of Wi-Fi," says Clint Wheelock, director of wireless research at In-stat/MDR, adding, "It will be especially good for areas that can't be served by cable modem or DSL. But it's not a market reality yet."

Will 3G Finally Arrive?

Nokia's 6230--supporting EDGE 3G--comes to the U.S. this year.

While 802.11 explodes, you'll see gradual growth in wireless Net access over the cellular network. After two years of false starts, the U.S. transition to third-generation (3G) data networks may finally be under way. Verizon recently rolled out a high-speed 3G service in the San Diego and Washington, D.C., metro areas that delivers data at 300 to 500 kilobits per second, with bursts up to 2 mbps. AT&T Wireless is planning to launch a 384-kbps data service in four U.S. cities by the end of 2004.

But adoption has been slowed by a welter of incompatible cellular standards, pricey handsets, and limited speeds. "There are no apps driving demand for 3G data access," says Wheelock. "Wi-Fi is a much more logical extension of broadband."

Meanwhile, Japan's DoCoMo (the world's leading wireless data provider) is conducting field trials of 4G networks, which will theoretically shuttle data at speeds of 100 mbps, though a working network probably won't be in place before 2010.

Wireless World

These wireless networks will lead to a raft of powerful portables. Intel is requiring Wi-Fi support in Centrino notebooks and has announced a new Xscale chip for PDAs and cell phones. Code-named Bulverde, the processor will support 3G networks and allow for real-time video capture, better multimedia playback, and lower power consumption.

Future devices will support multiple wireless technologies, so they can connect to any kind of hot spot without breaking a sweat, and deftly switch between Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

"You'll use Wi-Fi in the airport or your hotel room, and once you walk out the door, you'll switch to 3G," says Wi-Fi Alliance spokesperson Brian Grimm. "It just makes sense."

WiMax: Wireless on Steroids

While today's 802.11 Wi-Fi standards reach up to about 150 feet indoors, an emerging wireless technology called 802.16, or WiMax, could stretch as far as 30 miles. In late 2004 or early 2005 some homes and offices in areas without sufficient wired connections for DSL or cable services may receive broadband from a version of WiMax called 802.16a. Intel, a member of the nonprofit WiMax Alliance, envisions routers with two antennas: one using 802.16a to link to an ISP, and another with a form of 802.11 for faster connections within the home or office network.

By 2005 or 2006 another dual radio may appear in notebooks and handhelds, allowing them to connect to 802.11 networks when near a hot spot and to WiMax networks at other times. This will likely be the 802.16e flavor of WiMax, which may be able to maintain connections with users moving at up to 60 miles per hour.

Seán Captain

PC-Land Security

The year 2003 marked a turning point in PC security--and not in a good direction. Users were overwhelmed by waves of e-mail worms, from Blaster to SoBig, that stole personal information, spewed spam, and conducted DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. Security experts expect all of these threats to increase, not diminish.

"Over the next few years, we'll see a lot more controlled zombie networks, with end-user desktops used as servers for spammers and DDoS," says Thor Larholm, senior security researcher at PivX Solutions in Newport Beach, California.

For the next two years, we'll use the same weapons to fight back: antivirus software, spam filters, personal firewalls, and Windows patches. The difference is that many of these utilities may become part of the OS and operate automatically.

For example, Microsoft has announced a scheme that would turn XP's Internet Connection Firewall on by default; the plan might also install Windows and Office patches automatically. The company has test-marketed versions of Windows containing a stronger firewall, plus antivirus and backup utilities. Given Microsoft's history of packaging watered-down utilities in its OS, experts are skeptical of this approach.

The good news is, you'll see fewer buffer overflows or software "holes" that allow malicious code to take control of a machine, says Chris Wysopal, VP of Research and Development for security consultantcy firm @stake. That improvement is due in part to new tools that find overflows before they're exploited, and partly to a shift toward "managed code," which examines each set of instructions and grants permission before the code can execute.

The bad news? "Social-engineering attacks to draw people to fake Web sites or run Trojan [horse] programs will be worse," Wysopal says. "The human will still be the weak link."

Secure--But at What Price?

Removing human error from the equation is a key part of Microsoft's Next Generation Secure Computing Base, an ambitious proposal that aims to solve myriad security problems. Formerly known as Palladium, NGSCB (pronounced "eng-scub") will be woven into Microsoft's Longhorn OS when it's released in 2006.

Among other things, this scheme will verify the identity of each application, so you'll know that the software you just downloaded isn't a Trojan horse. NGSCB will encrypt data and keystrokes so they can be read only by trusted apps. It will create a sealed memory space for each program, so viruses won't be able to affect other programs.

And it will allow companies to determine how people use their content. For example, a software firm might prevent you from using unregistered versions of its products. If you download a film, the OS might let you view it but not make copies. Or a business might allow only certain individuals to open a Word document containing sensitive information, and then make the doc delete itself after a few days.

Office 2003's Information Rights Management feature allows you to control who can read or print documents, as well as to set expiration dates. But these capabilities demand some big trade-offs: Only Office 2003 apps can open restricted documents, and your network must be running Windows Server 2003.

Critics warn that such schemes could hand control of your computer to major corporations and could have other unintended consequences. "Vanishing e-mails will be attractive to corporations terrified of legal discovery," notes Ross Anderson, reader in security engineering at Cambridge University in England.

NGSCB will require new hardware. So Intel is developing a chip architecture, code-named LaGrande, to support it. Citing privacy concerns, Intel has said it will recommend that system builders let consumers opt in to enable LaGrande functions.

Stealth Security

Good encryption technologies already exist, but using them can be daunting for anyone other than a security geek. However, several products promise to bring encryption to the masses by implementing it automatically, with little or no work needed from end users.

PGP Corporation's new Universal software turns a server into a security box that encrypts, decrypts, and digitally signs a company's e-mail, without requiring employees to lift a finger. People outside the company can download client software that manages encrypted communication with the server.

And recently Leadtek Research started shipping motherboards with ENova's X-Wall LX-64 security chip installed. It automatically encrypts all data going into the hard drive and decrypts the data coming out, but only if users first insert a dongle containing the encryption key into the system's FireWire port.

Seán Captain

A blue FireWire key (above) unlocks data on the hard drive encrypted by the ENova chip (below).

That's Digitainment

After decades of hype, the long-promised convergence of PCs and consumer electronics has arrived. What will the home of the not-too-distant future look like? You'll still have your PCs and your wireless LAN, but new devices will connect your more-traditional PC to the big-screen TV in the living room and the surround-sound stereo upstairs.

"The home PC will evolve from a processing device to much more of an entertainment and networking hub," says Dominic Ainscough, senior analyst for The Yankee Group.

Yankee projects that, by 2007, some 18.5 million households--or about 1 out of 5--will own digital media receivers (like the Roku HD 1000 pictured on our cover) that connect their PCs to their home entertainment systems.

New game machines will add features like the ability to record TV shows and to handle video and audio. And digital set-top boxes designed to show video on demand and play streaming media will also vie for your dollars, thanks in part to big pushes by Intel and Microsoft to gain a foothold atop the boob tube.

"Consumers are reluctant to add yet another black box to their entertainment centers," says Kurt Scherf, VP of research for Parks Associates in Dallas, "but putting a DVD player, a disc burner, and a [digital] video recorder in one box is pretty compelling."

King of All Media

The keys to the PC's media domination will be new ways of handling multimedia data and moving it quickly between devices.

One technology likely to emerge by 2006 is UltraWideBand. Also known as IEEE 802.15a, UWB is a wireless technology that can blast out data at 100 mbps over distances of up to 10 feet.

UWB would be perfect for moving huge HDTV images between a media center and a TV set, says Parks Associates' Scherf. It could also replace USB 2.0 and FireWire cables for transferring images from digital camcorders to PCs.

"It requires a great deal of overhead to get HDTV packets to the right place at the right time," he adds. "Overwhelming speed is one way to guarantee quality of service."

In the next five years, the CPU's ability to handle multimedia will increase tenfold, notes Microprocessor Report's Peter Glaskowsky. "Real-time HDTV-encoding would be something the CPU could do casually," he says. That should pave the way for affordable HDTV camcorders and hi-def home-movie editing.

Hi-Def Jam

Couch potatoes will make a gradual transition to high-definition television, though not as quickly as once predicted. Currently, about a third of TV stations offer HDTV broadcasts, though only 4 percent of U.S. TV sets are able to display them, according to The NPD Group. The FCC has mandated that all new TVs be able to receive HDTV broadcasts by July 2007.

One barrier to digital TV has been the challenge of protecting digital content from file swappers. In November the FCC approved a plan that would require digital signals to contain a "broadcast flag"--code that allows broadcasts to be shared inside a home network but prevents their distribution on the Net. Critics fear such code may prevent consumers from burning copies of shows to a DVD--a form of copying currently allowed by law.

Assuming that consumers are able to record HDTV, they'll face still another difficulty. The next home video standard--High-Definition DVD--really consists of two incompatible standards. Both the Advanced Optical Disc format, backed by NEC and Toshiba, and Sony's competing Blu-ray format use blue lasers to pack more much more data on to discs than today's DVDs. AOD can store up to 20GB on each side of a single-layer disc. Blu-ray discs hold up to 27GB of data per side. Both formats require new players, which (naturally) can't play discs produced in the other format. Who will win this particular format war? Stay tuned.

Do-It-All Boxes and Home Broadcasting

Pioneer's DVR-810H-S plays from and records to a hard disk and DVDs.

In 2004 non-PC boxes, like the one shown here (see review), will further challenge media-savvy PCs. For example, Sony's networkable PSX--merging the PlayStation 2 game console, a TiVo-like video recorder, and a DVD player/recorder--should be hitting Japanese stores about now; Sony has not revealed U.S. plans. But a company called Ucentric says it will provide software to Samsung for a digital media hub that can "broadcast" stored content to TVs and stereos throughout the home by various means, including via ethernet cable or existing cable TV or phone-line wiring. That convenience could expand networking's appeal beyond early adopters with their spools of Cat5 ethernet cable. And by mid-2004, the IEEE should finalize the 802.11e standard to ensure "quality of service" for the smooth wireless streaming of audio and video content.

Seán Captain

Update: Whatever Happened To...?

Cornice hard drive (left) and DataPlay optical disc.

Promising technologies are like showbiz stars. Some make a splash and disappear. Others fade away for a bit, then recapture the limelight.

DataPlay was a one-hit wonder. The half-dollar-size optical discs--able to hold up to 500MB--looked like the perfect media for MP3 players in 2001. But after the IPod arrived, the future of portable music belonged to mini hard drives. When IRiver launched the first DataPlay-equipped player in mid-2002, scarcely anyone noticed. But now IRiver is one of several companies selling players using the Cornice Storage Element, a 1.5GB hard drive about the size of DataPlay's disc. And now some former DataPlay employees are working at Cornice.

Micro fuel cells may finally allow mobile electronics to achieve nirvana. By extracting electricity from a refillable liquid, likely alcohol, a fuel cell could produce up to 20 times as much power as a battery of the same size. Micro fuel cells still face hurdles, including regulatory approval. (Will the FAA allow flammable liquids in carry-on bags?) But with over a dozen companies, including PC makers, pursuing the technology, you may see some notebook fuel cells by 2005.

Seán Captain