Next Year's Model

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I bet the casinos of Las Vegas actually lose money during the week of Comdex. The annual high-tech event is by far the country's largest trade show, with more than 200,000 people showing up this year. For a week some of the wiliest folks from the world's richest and most powerful companies drop in on a place that specializes in separating fools from their money. Every night the pocket-protector crowd flocks to the gaming tables, and you can see the pit bosses tense up. If ever there was a time to suspect that someone at, say, the roulette table had an odds-calculating supercomputer hidden in his shoe, this is it.

That said, shoe-size supercomputers were the only data-crunching gadgets I did not see at Comdex last week. Plenty of ultrathin, superlight laptops were on exhibit though--the industry's response to the critical acclaim that met Sony's launch of the under-3-lb. Vaio earlier this year. While Sony has just introduced an even newer model, the Vaio 505FX, people looking for a great on-the-road machine should check out Toshiba's Portege 3010CT. The Portege weighs 2.9 lbs. and still packs a 10.4-in. active-matrix color screen, a 4.3-gigabyte hard disk and a 56K modem into its 3/4-in.-thick box. Both machines have 266-MHz Pentium chips and 90%-size keyboards, and both are in the $2,000 price range. The Sony is $100 cheaper, but I prefer the Toshiba because it has what I think of as a belly-button-style pointing device, as opposed to Sony's touch pad. (Touch pads do not respond well to my hands, which get hot and sweaty when I work.) Better still, Toshiba claims its machine will run four hours on one battery.

The most-fun software I saw came from a small Madison, Wis., shop called Sonic Foundry. Sonic's new line of sound-editing programs lets you create amazing music, even if you have a tin ear. I tried Sonic's Acid Rock ($49.95), which comes with more than 500 sound clips. You can listen to any clip by simply selecting it; when you find a sound you like, slap it onto a track in the editing room. Lay down a bass line, add percussion and instrumentation--the software will even resolve the key so that everything harmonizes. What's new and astounding here is that everything is rendered in real time: raise the pitch or lower it, speed up or slow down the beat while staying in key. Anything you do can be heard immediately. Not like the old days, when computer musicians had to wait for their compositions to be compiled and processed. Similarly, Play Inc.'s Amorphium ($149.95), which will ship next month, allows people to create sophisticated 3-D images. The company is best known for the special animation effects used in Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. Now you can animate, create special effects and do real-time morphing just like the pros.

All this manipulating of multimedia can really chew up one's hard drive, and, not surprisingly, plenty of companies are offering ever more capacious, ever cheaper ways to store your digital masterpieces. I was particularly impressed with the new Orb drive, which holds 2.2-gigabyte disks ($29). In January, Castlewood Systems Inc. will start shipping the first external Orb drives ($199). According to Syed Iftikar, the company's president, by this time next year, 5-gigabyte disks will be available. No word yet on a shoe-size supercomputer.

For more on Comdex see our website at timedigital.com Questions for Quittner? E-mail him at [email protected]