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It's a safe bet that hardware devices will keep getting faster, smaller, and cheaper. In the early 1990s, desktop computers were full-size towers with plenty of expansion slots and drive bays. Then came mini-towers and, in more recent years, micro-towers, each with two fixed drives, two optical drives, and a few extra slots. Now businesses are moving toward much smaller systems, such as the Compaq Evo and HP e-pc; each squeezes a hard drive and an optical drive into a machine the size of a hardcover book.

The continuous march toward smaller, lighter, and less expensive products is most apparent in portable computers. In our issue of March 26, we reviewed several 3- and 4-pound notebooks. No sooner did we finish our testing than even lighter ultraportables landed in PC Magazine Labs. One of them was the amazingly thin Toshiba Portégé 2000, which packs a 12-inch screen, 750-MHz Pentium III processor, 20GB hard drive, and great keyboard into a 2.6-pound, 0.7-inch-thick package. The basic model we tested gave us 2 hours of battery life, but you can add a battery slice that bumps that time up to more than 6 hours.

Right on the heels of the Portégé were more notebooks in its weight class, including the Compaq Evo N200, Dell Latitude X200, and Gateway Solo 200. These tiny notebooks all have adequate displays and processors, though none are as thin as the Portégé. (For more information on the Portégé, see "Ultraportables: How Low Can They Go?" in this issue's First Looks.)

But everything comes with trade-offs. For the latest processor, you'll want a notebook with the new Mobile Pentium 4, such as those we reviewed in First Looks, March 26. Check out our reviews of notebooks with this new processor in next issue's First Looks (April 23). Second, the basic ultraportable models don't include built-in optical drives, so you can't use them to watch DVD movies or to load or back up applications and data when you're on the road. You could buy an external drive or a base station, but that will increase your notebook's weight considerably. And you'll probably want to carry an extended-life battery to keep your notebook running long enough for cross-country flights.

Ultraportables probably won't replace your desktop computer, but they're certainly capable of running Windows XP, office productivity applications, e-mail programs, and Web browsers. Most of them even include built-in wireless networking. Without a doubt, I'm impressed with the new ultraportables.

Two Cool Cameras

Advances in miniturization don't end with notebooks: Digital cameras are smaller and better than ever. I recently had the chance to try the Minolta DiMage X, the first digital camera I've seen that is smaller than my wallet and takes great photos. Some very clever engineering went into the DiMage X. It uses a 3X auto-focus lens, but the lens doesn't move in and out of the camera when zooming. Instead, light travels through a prism inside the camera. As a result, the camera is only 3/4-inch thick. This 2-megapixel camera (my previous column mistakenly said 3-megapixel) has a maximum resolution of 1,600-by-1,200 and a nice LCD viewfinder on the back. It uses an SD card for memory and comes with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and a charger. At about $400, the DiMage X is a great deal if you're looking for a very good, very portable, and very cool camera.

Even lighter digital cameras are on the way. I'm amazed by the new 1.7-ounce Benq (formerly Acer) DC 300mini, which I've been carrying around in my pocket. The size of a small stack of business cards, the 300mini has a USB connector that plugs into your computer and runs on a single triple-A battery. You can also use the 300mini as a Webcam, but you'll want to get the extension USB cable.

The downside of the 300mini is its quality, which is fine for a $99 camera but certainly not up to the quality of higher-end digital cameras. It has only a single fixed lens and holds 24 images at a resolution of 640-by-480 or 107 images at 320-by-240 resolution. That's enough capacity to post quick images on the Web, but you would not want to print any of those photos larger than 3 by 5 inches. The 300mini comes with ArcSoft PhotoBase software for downloading images, but the editing tools are simplistic, and I've had some problems when using the software with Windows XP. Still, for the price, the 300mini is one camera that I think plenty of folks will want. With a new generation of smaller, lighter cameras, we're likely to see them showing up in more places, especially as integrated components of notebooks and PDAs.

The Next Technology Market

I had the opportunity to attend several receptions in conjunction with the World Economic Forum, which was held here in New York City in February. I spoke with some senior executives from Sun Microsystems and Compaq about how this year is shaping up for the technology market.

Everyone I spoke with agreed that the market this year is fairly flat—not declining as it was in 2001 but not picking up rapidly, either. Everyone expressed hope for a bigger increase later in the year. Technology vendors are saying that businesses aren't investing in IT projects in which the payback can take years. Rather, businesses want to see immediate improvements on the bottom line, often through more efficient and less costly operations. Senior IT execs tell me that the technologies with the most traction today are security, wireless, and application integration, which is particularly true when these technologies leverage the investments that companies have made over the past few years.

Recently, the research arm of Ziff Davis Media surveyed 413 of our readers to get a better understanding of what products they're buying and how they go about the buying process. What is most interesting to me is our finding that about 40 percent of IT projects don't come from previously budgeted IT funds. Instead, new, unplanned budgets are approved specifically for these projects. The bottom line: Technology projects are alive and well in corporate America. They just need to show a more immediate return on investment.

Is a Personal Robot in Your Future?

New products drive the technology business, and the annual Demo conference has always been one of my favorites. At this year's show, enterprise software took the spotlight for one simple reason: "That's where the money is," says Chris Shipley, Demo's executive producer.

I saw some great enterprise tools, but there was enough cool technology to satisfy the gadget lover in me. The most impressive new launch was a software platform from Evolution Robotics for developing personal robots. The company's first product is a $999 kit for building your own robot, which runs from a laptop computer it carries around. The kit consists of a basic camera, a number of mechanical parts, some sensors, and software that makes it all work together. Visual-recognition software lets the robot identify objects—such as a book or a credit card—and offers basic controls for recognizing inputs from its assortment of sensors. Think of this technology as LEGO MindStorms on steroids. (For more information on Evolution Robotics, see "Roll Your Own Robot" in this issue's Pipeline.)

One of the neatest hardware devices I saw was a multilevel display from a company called Deep Video Imaging. The display has two LCD planes, the first of which is transparent, so you can see "actual depth." A multilevel display can be useful in tight spaces where you need one monitor to do the work of two. It's also a clever way to get better depth perception or to display both depth and information, say for air traffic control.

I was also impressed by Valence Technology, which showed a new type of battery—called the Valence N-Charge Power System—that's designed to pack more power into a smaller space. The company showed off what looked like a rectangular black plate that can attach to the bottom of a notebook and extend battery life to 10 hours. The big difference between the Valence battery and other types of batteries is that the cobalt in a typical lithium ion system is replaced with cheaper, less volatile phosphate. (For more information on the N-Charge Power System, see "Battery Boost" in this issue's Pipeline.)

IBM Research showed a prototype of the IBM MetaPad—a complete PC (without a monitor and a keyboard) that fits into a coat pocket. The MetaPad measures 3 by 5 by 0.8 inches (HWD) and plugs into a small display to create a tabletlike PC. The prototype has an 800-MHz Transmeta processor, 128MB of RAM, a 5GB hard drive (which the developers say will soon increase to 10GB), and a Silicon Motion 3D graphics chip. The MetaPad can run Windows or Linux.

The Demo show is usually on target for the future direction of computing, so get ready for some great new products.