You like to stay home, but you hate watching blockbuster movies on a puny screen with sound squeaking from tiny speakers. You want your IT job to be easier. You want your guitar to be cooler.
You want your music — not someone else's — playing while you drive or work out. You crave into-the-night Game Boy action. You want an easy way to stay cool, keep the lights just right and keep an eye on your kid. You hate opening and closing the photo scanner lid.
Tech developers — bless 'em — can accommodate.
They've come up with a slew of products that can satisfy those needs and more. Some are available already and others are on the way. But these award-winners for innovation at the International Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, while packed with sophisticated technology, aim to meet consumers' basic needs.
First off, that need for a big picture in a puny room. Sharp has developed the Theago DLP Personal Home Theater for you. Its "short-throw" lens can project large images in small rooms.
The Theago — short for "theater on the go" — weighs less than eight pounds, enabling easy portability. Sports, movies, TV and even video games can be projected with the Theago, even from a ceiling mount, although it is available with an optional table stand and screens in various sizes.
For another entertainment option, the Game Boy Advance, players will get a charge out of a new product from Gemini Industries. The Solar Pak XP is a power supply for the game that transforms natural sunlight into power to supplement batteries, making it the first solar-based source for handheld game consoles. It also can store energy charges from the included AC adapter.
Part of the company's "Game Elements" line of accessories, the Solar Pak attaches to the console. Not only can it soak up light for power, but it also can help players in the dark by flipping open to provide light to shine on the game panel.
For a sound investment, Gibson Labs believes it has a magic guitar, or at least a guitar with MaGIC, which stands for "Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier."
The six-string Gibson MaGIC-enabled guitar allows for each string to have its own amplifier, or the user can record strings individually into a computer.
Compatible with existing equipment, the guitar also provides musicians with great flexibility through the individual string input. For example, the player can adjust volume, pan and equalization of individual strings or have a heavy-metal sound on the low strings, medium distortion on the middle ones and a "clean" sound on the high ones.
The digital guitar eliminates the annoying hums from traditional electric guitars' stray frequencies and guitar cable's picking up of stray sounds. It lets the user run a cable more than 2,000 meters with no loss of audio quality, according to the company.
MaGIC is an Ethernet media delivery system designed to replace all wiring systems in the instrument fields and consumer electronic applications, which the company says will allow the batch of wires behind home entertainment systems to be replaced by a single Ethernet cable.
Music listeners aren't being left out. Nike and Philips like to say their new line of Nike Portable Sport Audio Players are for athletes who like to "use" rather than "listen to" music or for folks who like to enjoy their tunes while on the move.
The products are designed to play FM radio, CDs or MP3s without skipping, are splash-proof, sport remote controls, can be attached to an exerciser via armbands and feature a round design that keeps the user from being poked by a corner while doing sit-ups.
Sweaty folks supposedly will have no trouble accessing control buttons — they're rubber — as they access between one to two hours of near-CD-quality music on players with a battery life of more than nine hours.
Tired of waiting for your favorite songs or that sports update while driving to work? Rockford Corp.'s Omnifi can help eliminate that.
Omnifi allows people to download music, radio programs or other programming from the Internet wirelessly to the PC and then to a car. Yep, no more need to burn CDs to hear digital music during the commute to work or flip from radio station to radio station for that news update.
What's more, the media player application that manages Omnifi allows users to schedule the delivery of the content they want to the devices. Translation: It lets people set info and music preferences and have that delivered to the players automatically and wirelessly. Further translation: It soaks up weather and traffic reports, stock quotes, news, horoscopes or other information or music and can have it ready for playing when you get behind the wheel.
The Omnifi can store and play back hundreds of hours of downloaded music, audio books, customized information and more.
For non-commuting days, a home audio/home theater version using the Omnifi technology streams the content from the PC to those home devices, also using wireless technology.
Moving to another sense — sight — Hewlett-Packard is hoping picture-perfect results develop for users of its HP Scanjet 5500c digital flatbed scanner. The device has an automatic feeder that enables simple scanning and digitizing of a stack of up to two dozen pix that are in either 3-by-5- or 4-by-6-inch formats. Just place them in the feeder and push one button.
Scanned images of up to 2,400 dots per inch can be viewed in about seven seconds, with no warm-up time. Among the one-touch buttons are those that have a "share-to-Web" option, HP Memories Disc Creator software for creating photo CDs to be viewed on a PC or DVD player, and copying and e-mailing capabilities.
The Scanjet 5500c comes with a lighted adapter to allow for 35mm negatives and slides to be scanned.
Information technology departments looking to make their work life easier can turn to the Compaq Evo T20, a Windows-based terminal commonly called a "thin client."
The skinny devices with no moving parts acts as a "window" to a server, which stores applications and data. The thin client processes only keyboard input and screen output.
Having the applications run from a single server instead of individual PCs is supposed to simplify the entire infrastructure.
Saving space. Saving money. Saving time. More reliability. More security. It's all designed to be a perfect fit for companies that have standardized computing tasks and workers occupying small workspaces, like call centers, reservation centers, data entry facilities or information retrieval centers.
Thin clients can be managed remotely, software changes on a central server instead of individual PCs is simpler, and maintenance costs and time shrink. With no removable media, end-users can't introduce new software and its related viruses. Plus, because clients work only when connected to host servers, the threat of theft is reduced.
Centralized control also is at the heart of the Plexus Home and Life Automation system by Scientia Technologies. It lets people control a variety of devices from — get this — a variety of devices.
Designed to be affordable and easy to use, Plexus system enables a person to make adjustments to stereo and home theater systems, security systems or baby monitors, lighting, climate control systems, computer software or sprinkler systems.
CDs, DVDs, MP3s and other media can be cataloged and then searched by genre, title or artist. TV listings can be updated or filtered according to user settings.
But the trick is that the control can be handled on a palmtop PC, pocket PC, Palm device, cell phone or Windows-based PC. Plexus can be set up in a wired or wireless configuration, and a customizable display lets the user see only what they want to see.
E-MAIL: bwallace@desnews.com