Picks and Pans at TechXNY (PC Expo)

The once-grand show is losing steam, but among the ruins we find a few products to love (and a few to mock).

PCWorld.com Staff

NEW YORK-- PC Expo mirrors life.

That slightly twisted cliché is the best description we can muster for PC Expo here this week. Folded into the TechXNY show, this year's PC Expo seemed a direct reflection of the current state of the PC and technology industries to which it caters. In other words, it was kind of a drag.

With the economy down and technology sales slumping, few companies seemed interested in showcasing anything too amazing--probably for fear that it would be lost in the current funk. Add to that the simple fact that many major companies chose to avoid the show altogether (Dell, for example, didn't even bother with off-site meetings this year) and the show barely managed to fill a single floor of the sprawling Javitz Center here.

Still, the intrepid editors of PC World endured. After three days of wandering about the refreshingly uncrowded show floor, here are our picks for the best, worst, and weirdest this year's show had to offer.

Best Low-Priced Notebook: Sony's new VAIO PGC-SR33 notebook is a steal at $1000 (with a $100 rebate, good through October). It packs a Celeron 600 CPU, 128MB of memory, a 10.4-inch active-matrix screen, and a 10GB hard drive, all in an ultraportable, 3-pound, roughly 1-inch-thick package. The keyboard is a bit small, and the floppy and optical drives are external, but at this price and weight, who cares? --Anush Yegyazarian

An Upgrade Worth the Work: Powerleap's Renaissance 370s computer on an ISA card. Upgrade your old PC's CPU, graphics, and other vital components with one motherboard-replacement card that rests snugly in an ISA slot of your newly retired motherboard. Available with Intel Celeron or PIII chips, the entry-level product offers a 766-MHz Celeron chip, 128MB of memory, and AGP 4X graphics for $269. If you have an old PC you've been hankering to upgrade but don't want to pull the old motherboard out, this is worth checking out. --Ramon G. McLeod

PDAs on Parade

Casio Gets Picked and Panned: When is a Pocket PC not a Pocket PC? When it is Casio's midline-price, color-screen BE-300 Cassiopeia Pocket Manager. Casio deserves plaudits for trying to make the complex, feature-rich, Windows CE easier to use through a proprietary system shell on top of the Windows CE operating system. However, that same interface requires yet another proprietary system (albeit one open to program developers) that requires software that won't work on any other WinCE device. Casio goes to all this work for the sake of simplicity, but if you really want simple, stick to a Palm OS device. --Michael Lasky and Denny Arar

Best PDA Trade-in Offer I Must Refuse: Handspring extended to trade show visitors its well-publicized Web-site-only offer to trade in old Handsprings and Palms for $100 off a brand-new $399 Visor Edge. It's an appealing offer, but you see, I have all of my show appointments on my handheld. If I turn in my Visor for a new one I might as well go home. Hey, wait a minute... --Tom Mainelli

Weirdest PDA minitrend: Offbeat input devices for handheld computers. Among the contenders at the show: TT Tech's Snap N Type (a micro-QWERTY keyboard you stick a Handspring PDA into) and Matias's Half Keyboard (a 22-key model you can strap to your arm). Oddest of all was a motion-sensor add-on that Palm demonstrated: Plug it into your palmtop, and you can move the cursor around by wiggling the entire computer up and down or from side to side. --Harry McCracken

The LCDs Cometh

Best New LCD Technology: Eizo Nanao's new LCD scaling chip. Finally, a flat-panel LCD that can run at more than one resolution. Thanks to a new scaling chip, Eizo-Nanao's latest LCD panel, the Flexscan L461, looks great at its native resolution of 1280 by 1024 and handles lower resolutions smoothly, as well. --Eric Dahl

Best New Big-Ass Flat Panel Displays: Viewsonic premiered a 20.1-inch display, the VP201mb, and a 23.1-incher, the VP230mb (which the company says is the world's largest LCD computer monitor). These displays are beautiful; they offer crisp, sharp images, and absolutely no ghosting. One minor problem: they are outrageously expensive. Viewsonic expects the 20.1-inch VP201mb to sell for $3295, and you'll pay about $1000 for every inch beyond that (putting the 23.1-inch VP231mb at about $6235). --Sean Captain and Steve Bass

I Want My LCD TV: Fans of the boob tube may sit up in their easy chairs upon seeing Sharp's new Aquos brand of LCD televisions. The 13-inch, 15-inch, and 20-inch silver-framed TVs with stereo speakers will carry suggested retail prices of $1599, $2299, and $3999, respectively. They're expensive, but man, are they cool. --Sean Captain

The Best Add-Ons, Extras, and Software

Storage for Your Pocket: Winner of the "Boy Is That a Tiny Storage Device" Award is the pricey but cool DiskOnKey from M-Systems. This key chain doubles as a miniature data storage device for saving up to 32MB of data. The USB-based flash memory key chain comes in three flavors: 8MB for $49; 16MB for $69, and 32MB for $99. Perfect for anyone who wants files handy all the time, it could, however, bring a whole new meaning to the term lost data. --Tom Spring

Honey, I Shrunk the Hub: Keyspan's Mini 4-Port USB Hub lets you expand one USB port to four for only $49. What's the big deal? It's small--really small--about the size of a matchbook. Available next month, the USB 1.1 hub supports both bus-powered and self-powered modes and comes with an equally teeny AC adapter. Great for travel, this little guy will also help expand desktop USB capabilities without taking up any extra desk real estate. --Michael Lasky

Will the Messiah Come? Say what you will about Microsoft (and we will), but it seemed like every vendor at TechX/PC Expo is pinning its hopes for an industry rebound on Windows XP. As one major CPU-maker put it: "XP is going to give people a reason to buy computers again. We hope." --Ramon G. McLeod

Best Bet For Backup: Dantz's Retrospect is a $50 application that makes backing up all your important information easy and fast. The program lets you schedule backup times, makes restoring files easy, and even compresses your data to save space and time. Backups aren't an exciting topic, but they're very important, and this product is just slick. --Steve Bass

Wow, a 100MB Zip Drive: Iomega just released an external Zip 100 drive that has the same form factor as an external 250 they have been shipping for almost two years. In other words, the new product is less powerful than the old, which has also been out forever. Thanks, guys! --Sean Captain

But What Does the Survey Say? Perseus released version 4.0 of SurveySolutions for the Web here. The relatively inexpensive ($229) software uses an easy-to-understand word-processor interface, so you can craft professional-looking surveys in just a few minutes. It's pretty obvious why organizations like the NBA and Harvard University use this product--it's the real deal. --Ramon G. McLeod

Most Promising Technology Not Quite Here Yet: Atheros offered a glimpse of high-speed wireless networking to come with its working demo of two notebooks equipped with adapters using the company's 802.11a chips. This next-generation version of the popular 802.11b standard supports speeds of up to 52 megabits per second, more than enough for transmission of full-motion video over the airwaves, which was capably demonstrated by the broadcast of a film clip from one notebook to another. However, since 802.11a uses a different frequency than its predecessor, it won't be backward compatible. The first 802.11a products should be available this year. --Denny Arar

Miscellaneous Ramblings

Most intriguing rivalry: Both Hewlett-Packard and Compaq showed off MP3 jukeboxes that sit in your stack of stereo components and don't require a PC. We're used to these megacompanies duking it out--but not with consumer electronics products that will probably wind up in the living room. --Harry McCracken

Biggest No-Show: Dot-coms. While virtually every product had an Internet angle, purely Internet-based companies were nowhere to be seen. It was a stark contrast to last year's show, which was overrun with smirky images of hyper-cool geekazoids sporting the blunt message: we get it, and you don't. Well, in the jargon of those days, they've been disintermediated.--Ramon G. McLeod and Harry McCracken

Best Promotional Stunt: At a show where freebies were few and far between, you have to try something to get noticed. Some industrious flack taped a handwritten note at the men's restroom near the press room promoting a rugged handheld from Symbol. I'm not sure I'd want my product mentally associated with using the john, but the tactic did get my attention --Tom Mainelli

Biggest No-Show, Part Deux: USB 2.0. While Orange Micro and Adaptec showed off a few PCI and PC Card-based 2.0 products at their booths, the so-called USB Pavilion consisted of a whopping three companies (the sign was bigger than the pavilion) with unfamiliar names and little to show. This standard is promising, but repeated promises that the technology and peripherals that use it are just around the corner are getting old. --Tom Mainelli

Darth Vader Award: Microsoft's Mobile Experience Tour Truck. This all-black big-rig truck was parked on the show floor with a huge black canvas structure built around it so that Microsoft could stage its Mobile Experience show in a movie theater-like setting. Unfortunately, the whole dark thing looked like it just arrived from the Evil Empire. We're pretty sure that wasn't what Bill intended. Pretty sure... --Ramon G. McLeod

The Why Don't You Shut Up Award: This year's winner is Cingular, which blasted tunes by Sinatra, Tom Jones, and others so loudly the people next door at Intel's booth could hardly hear themselves talk. Was that really necessary? --Denny Arar

Most Telling Comment Overheard at the Show: "It's a bad sign when the biggest line is at the booth where you can refill your old printer ink cartridges." --Eric Dahl

Coolest-Sounding Product, Even if We Haven't a Clue What it Does: J&H Technology's "3D binocular stereo digital range finder." Combine a name like that with a product that looks like night vision goggles for a computer and you've got a sure-fire way to turn heads around the office. Just be sure to brush up on your bureaucratese so you can confuse your boss into signing the expense form. --Eric Dahl

The 'I Can't Believe I Ate That' Award: Picture an edible cookie with your face printed on it. If that sounds hard to swallow, wait until you sample the cookies baked by ImageStation. An unpalatable mix of floury cardboard and sugar, the company hawks an 18 pack for $29. You upload a digital image to the Sony-owned ImageStation Web site and the company cooks up the culinary disaster and snail-mails you edible images. These shortbread cookies are a novel idea--if you want to associate your mug with bad taste. --Tom Spring

Easiest Place to Find a Seat: In the seats reserved for Transmeta's show-floor presentations. The processor company was the toast of last year's event, demonstrating prototype notebooks from big shooters like IBM. While the company's processors appeared in three of four notebooks chosen for best of show awards, there's a different vibe this year. Despite the company's launch this week of a brand new Crusoe processor, few show visitors seemed interested in hearing the details--as evidenced by the embarrassingly large number of empty seats during many presentations. --Tom Mainelli

Surest Bet For Next Year: That the name "PC Expo" will be formally retired. Sure, PCs remain part of the story, but they're no longer the main attraction. If you named this year's event based purely on where the action was, it would have been "Wireless and PDA Expo." Next year, who knows? --Harry McCracken

(Compiled by Tom Mainelli.)