Mobile Computing: Highs and Lows at the High-Tech Hotel

We test new Web access and entertainment services offered at hotels.

James A. Martin

Feature: High-Tech Hotels

Though he has all but vanished from movie screens lately, actor Val Kilmer refused to vanish from my TV screen. I pushed this button on the remote, I pushed that button, and still, there was Val, frozen in place.

I dialed the hotel operator. "The KoolConnect system in my room is stuck," I explained. I was spending the night in room 513 at the Westin San Francisco Airport. My purpose: to test one of the hotel's state-of-the-art rooms. Last year, the hotel was one of two Westins (the other is in Fort Lauderdale) to install KoolConnect on a trial basis.

KoolConnect is an in-room entertainment system from KoolConnect Technologies that delivers video on demand with VCR-like controls, games, and other interactive content to TV sets. What's more, KoolConnect offers the ability to check e-mail and surf the Web right from the hotel TV via a high-speed connection. Hotel guests can take care of business and pleasure with one in-room service. I found KoolConnect to be a concept cool indeed--but the execution, at least at the Westin San Francisco Airport, left me cold.

Ready for Prime Time?

A maintenance worker arrived, pushed the reset button on the back of the KoolConnect box (which sits on top of the TV, like a tiny cable converter box), and rebooted the system. I wasn't the first to experience this problem, he said. In fact, the hotel would be removing the KoolConnect system next week, he added.

The hotel management later confirmed his report. KoolConnect was removed from the hotel less than a week after my visit, according to Tim Lusher, general manager. Screen freezes like as the one I experienced, along with dropped Web access, had been persistent problems, he explained. KoolConnect had been installed in four of the Westin San Francisco Airport's 440 rooms in May 2002. Eventually installed in 24 rooms, the KoolConnect service was still considered to be in testing phase when it was removed, Lusher said.

By comparison, the Westin Fort Lauderdale currently offers KoolConnect in all 293 rooms. Installed in September 2002, the service has been popular and largely without problems, according to a management executive who asked not to be identified.

KoolConnect spokesperson Christopher Wild couldn't comment on the Westin San Francisco Airport's service problems because he hadn't heard about them. The service is currently installed in seven hotels, including a Holiday Inn in Kansas City, with no significant problems reported, Wild says. The company was on course to have approximately 20,000 hotel rooms wired with KoolConnect by sometime this year, he added.

The Good News

In addition to KoolConnect, my room came equipped with a broadband Internet connection, to which guests can connect using a notebook's Ethernet port. This service, called TurboNet, is accessed via a router located on the hotel room desk and is a separate offering from KoolConnect. As I tested it, I was able to connect and receive e-mail effortlessly, but couldn't send messages. The maintenance man suggested I reboot. I followed his advice, and after restarting my computer, my e-mail messages were released at last into the ether. From that point, I had no more trouble sending e-mail, and my Internet connection remained reliable though at times a tad slow.

Like KoolConnect, the Westin San Francisco Airport's broadband Internet access service is also in testing phase, the maintenance man reminded me. The start-up screen, when I first logged on, said the service was a trial and, as such, was being offered free to guests.

As for KoolConnect, I resumed browsing the video-on-demand choices and watched several previews. (The Adventures of Pluto Nash--what was Eddie Murphy thinking?) New releases are $12.95; older movies, $5.95. From the latter category, I selected The Accidental Tourist, a 1988 drama with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. The movie played flawlessly, and using the remote control, I paused it for a trip to the bathroom. Halfway through I bookmarked my place and picked up where I left off the next morning. (Hotel satellite TV services, by comparison, generally show movies at appointed times and provide no VCR-like controls.)

Once I'd finally gotten rid of Val Kilmer, I found KoolConnect to be, well, cool. For business travelers, tourists, or anyone staying in a hotel, the ability to watch what you want, when you want, is a terrific way to unwind. And the ability to check e-mail and surf the Web is an attractive alternative to lugging a notebook.

Also, it should be noted that video on demand is still a new technology, just now beginning to show up in hotels and cable systems. As such, technical snafus are to be expected and are likely to be resolved in time.

For more information on Westin properties. And to search for hotels with high-speed Internet connections, try Expedia.com.

Notebooks & Accessories

News: The Incredible Shrinking Hard Drive

Notebook users can never have enough backup storage. Problem is, to get more than 650MB or so (the standard capacity for CDs), you need to carry around a portable hard drive. But there's good news: StorCard, a new removable storage device, packs from 100MB to 5GB of data on a credit-card-size device. Amazingly, the encrypted data is accessed on a small spinning disk inside the card. The card is inserted into a StorReader, a Type II PC Card or a USB 2.0 drive that reads and writes to the card. The reader will go for about $100 and the cards for less than $15 each when they become available midyear.

News: NEC's Tiny Tablet PC

With its 10.4-inch TFT display and svelte figure (only about half an inch thick), NEC's VersaPro is one of the smallest Tablet PC devices yet to debut. A typical configuration will include a 933-MHz Ultra Low Voltage Pentium III-M from Intel, 256MB of SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive for about $2000. The VersaPro is currently available in Japan, with North American release expected by late March.

News: Affordable Notebooks From Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba

Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba recently introduced new notebooks aimed at bargain hunters. From HP comes the Ze4200 series, with preconfigured models offering either Mobile AMD Athlon XP, Intel's Mobile Intel Celeron, or Mobile Intel Pentium 4-M processors. The bottom-line model comes with a 1.6-GHz Mobile Intel Celeron processor, 128MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and a 14.1-inch TFT display for $849 (after a $100 mail-in rebate).

Toshiba's new models in the Satellite 2430/2435 series (prices begin at $1699) feature desktop Intel Pentium 4 processors running at 2.4 GHz, while two new Satellite 2410/2415 notebooks ($1449 and up) use the 2.0-GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4-M chips in their base configurations.

Handhelds

News: The Dawdling Dell Axim

Some Dell customers are posting complaints about how long it takes to get their hands on the Axim, Dell's first PDA. The average wait is about two weeks for a basic Axim, compared to three to five days for a PC, a Dell spokesperson acknowledged. "The popularity of the product and some of the accessories we've added have resulted in longer lead times," the spokesperson said. One anonymous prospective Axim customer, contacted through the Dell message board, has been waiting three weeks to receive a base-model Axim.

News: A Hottie From Hitachi

Exclusively sold through Sprint PCS, Hitachi's new Multimedia Communicator is said to be the first Pocket PC/phone with a built-in digital camera, keyboard, and 400-MHz Intel XScale processor. The device will retail for about $500 when it becomes available (by June) and will work with Sprint's high-speed Vision service.

News: Two Megapixels, Many Features

Once more, Sony delivers an attention-grabbing Palm OS-based PDA. The Clie PEG-NZ90 includes a built-in 2-megapixel camera with flash and auto-focus; that's pretty impressive for a PDA. Also included: an MP3 player and voice recorder, a remote controller for audiovisual devices, Bluetooth connectivity, and an expansion slot for 802.11b wireless networking. The Clie includes a redesigned USB cradle with a video output jack, which means you can view stored JPEG images on a computer monitor or TV. But there's a catch: All this costs about $800, which is about the same as some low-end notebooks.

Wireless

News: 802.11a Products Are Certifiable

In a recent newsletter I wrote about 802.11g, a new wireless specification promising speeds up to 54 megabits per second. But "g" has competition: 802.11a, which offers the same speed but is incompatible with both 802.11b (Wi-Fi) and 802.11g. The Wi-Fi Alliance has unveiled the first list of products built for 802.11a that have passed interoperability tests in its lab. The tests are designed to ensure that 802.11a products from one vendor play nicely with 802.11a products from another. The industry group expects to begin certifying 802.11g products this summer.

Suggestion Box

Is there a particularly cool mobile computing product or service I've missed? Got a spare story idea in your back pocket? Contact me with details.

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