Giant CeBIT show goes mobile

In the wake of the burst of the dot-com bubble, several familiar faces will be absent from Hanover's exhibition halls for the annual CeBIT trade show this year. Even old stalwart Microsoft will no longer occupy its usual dominant position by the North entrance.

However, Microsoft was not deposed from its role as gatekeeper because of the stock market. Rather, it was a sweeping move to group companies by product category: desktop software and hardware here, back-office applications there, video games in one corner, and mobile phones in another. CeBIT runs from March 13 through March 20 at the Messegelande in Hanover, Germany.

IN-DEPTH CeBIT 2002: Global Tech Fair     QUICKVOTE Are current computer and Internet security systems strong enough to deal with hackers and potential terror threats? Yes No View Results

Situating Microsoft, now active in all these categories, in the new taxonomy must have been a real headache for the show's organizers. The compromise they have reached is to put the company in the center of the East side of the show ground. From there, through placements on partners' stands, its tentacles radiate across the entire show.

Wireless Wonders

Microsoft even gets top billing in the speaker program, with Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer's keynote listed before German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's opening ceremony speech in official announcements about the event. Ballmer will talk about Microsoft's Mira wireless tablet-cum-remote control, company sources say.

Among Mira's admirers is National Semiconductor, which says it will have things to say about it too.

Koninklijke Philips Electronics is a little more cagey. Certainly what it has to show, a detachable PC monitor that users can remove from its cradle and carry around while continuing their work over an IEEE 802.11b wireless connection, sounds Mira-like, but Allard Bijlsma, general manager of Philips' PC peripherals and wireless division for Europe, wouldn't confirm the link.

Ballmer will also speak about Microsoft's mobility division and Xbox game console. The vice president of Microsoft's Mobility Group, Juha Christensen, will also attend, and the company will be displaying devices based on its recently-announced Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition and Windows Powered Smartphone software suites, both of which sit on top of its Windows CE 3.0 operating system.

The company also promises "a major carrier announcement." That announcement could come from mmO2, the British mobile phone operator recently spun off from British Telecommunications. Mmo2 is working on the XDA, a combined mobile phone and personal digital assistant running the Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition software, and it hopes to announce pricing and availability for the device at the show, a spokesperson says.

Multimedia and Mobile

For those seeking escape from the wall-to-wall Microsoft coverage, Hitachi will be presenting a variety of wearable Internet appliances complete with visor displays which offer instant Net access "whilst on the move, relaxing at home, or in the office," the company says.

Alongside its connected clothing, Hitachi will also be presenting something without buttons: a prototype mobile terminal it calls "Waterscape." This portable multimedia display can show movie clips or photographs, play music, and read news articles or e-mail. It senses its orientation, so the buttonless device is controlled by tilting or turning. It remains to be seen how you reboot a device with no Ctrl, Alt, or Delete buttons: pick it up and shake it?

Toshiba will be showing, yes, yet another Pocket PC 2002 PDA. Its e570 is targeted exclusively at business users, it says. But Toshiba will also have in its innovations corner a PDA running on alcohol, and a BlueLaser DVD optical disc. Blue lasers have a shorter wavelength than the red lasers used in conventional DVD players: their ability to write data in smaller tracks on the disc makes for storage capacities up to 27GB.

Also on the Toshiba stand: Bluetooth for the home and the office; its first notebook with a mobile GeForce4 GO graphics processor; and the Portege 2000, which Toshiba says is the slimmest notebook in the world. We'll see how that claim holds up after a week of eating the rich food in exhibition center restaurants.

Wearable Wares

IBM has rented 22,110 square feet to showcase the whole gamut of its activities, from its WatchPad prototype wristwatch-PDA up to its autonomic computing project, based on the premise that the complexity and scope of IT infrastructure in the next ten years will increase exponentially, requiring systems able to monitor, maintain, and repair themselves.

Compaq, too, plans demos in all sizes, from its tiny iPaq 3870 -- a PDA with 64MB of RAM, a Bluetooth interface, and security and back-office integration software built in -- up to its XXL grid computing exhibit, "a worldwide cluster solution for high-performance technical computing," according to a company statement. In between are wireless networks in all shapes and sizes and -- still in the showcases but not in the stores -- a demonstration of Marvel, its next-generation Alpha processors.

Hewlett-Packard will show products for always-on Internet infrastructures, mobility, digital convergence, and digital imaging, it says. The company will also show other products due for launch this year, including new HP Omnibook laptops, its latest Jornada PDAs, and a digital camera which allows users to send photographs to all sorts of places at the push of a button.

Advanced Micro Devices is one of the few companies that has nothing to say about wireless networking -- but it will be showing its Hammer 64-bit processor and talking about HyperTransport bus technology.

Samsung Electronics will be showing a number of mobile communications products at CeBIT, some of them for the first time in public, it says.

Finally, Sun Microsystems is also expected to show some updates to its workstation line.