Consumer mp3 player report

For the past 13 years, the Demo trade show has lured a select group of journalists and venture capitalists all hoping to catch a glimpse of the next big thing. Sometimes, when the product is something like the Palm Pilot, they get their wish. Other times, with products like Microsoft Bob or the Kerbango Internet Radio, the impact is less certain. But even if the products are less successful, the trends identified typically drive computing over the next few years, and this year should prove no different. Spam, security, wireless, and digital imaging all took center stage. But there were three particular products that stood out, focusing on three different technologies.

Wireless Water: Wireless technology has gone from curiosity to useful business tool to home network panacea—and now it's going into just about every consumer device. Digital Sun rolled out a wireless technology that will keep your lawn green and save water too!

MP3 Meets Wave Radio: Sure, you've got a lot of MP3 files. But how can you listen to high-quality audio from anywhere in your house? TerraDigital has the answer with a wireless device that combines a boombox with audio quality akin to that from the Bose Wave Radio.

Webmail: If you've got standard Outlook e-mail, and you're happy with it, great. But if you spend any time using Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or other Web-based e-mail, you're likely overwhelmed with spam, banners, and other junk, to say nothing about the difficulty you have reading multiple e-mails. But now you can have all the benefits of a rich Windows-style e-mail user interface from any Web browser, using a service called Oddpost.

Look for more details on the Demo trade show at eWeek.com and ExtremeTech.com.

Save Water with Wireless Sprinkler System

These days, wireless seems to be seeping into just about everything—so why not into the garden? Digital Sun, a new company cofounded by ex-TiVo executives, unveiled a product at this year's Demo 2003 that brings wireless technology into the garden. The X.Sense is a wireless mesh network designed to meter the flow of water to your lawn and garden.

The heart of the X.Sense system is a green stake, called the S.Sensor, which you put into your lawn. Traditional wired moisture sensors have two limitations. First, they only measure the moisture content of the soil that comes into contact with the sensor, and second, you have to run a wire from the sensor back to the controller box that activates the watering valves.

The S.Sensor uses electromagnetic technology to sample moisture content in a 6-inch radius around the stake, which Digital Sun claims gives a much more accurate reading. Also, inside the stake, a tiny 900-MHz wireless radio and antenna relay those moisture readings to a controller that attaches to a traditional multizone watering regulator.

The stake itself runs on a standard AA battery that should require replacement just once a year. A tiny display on top lets you manually check the water content of the soil simply by pressing a plastic cap.

Installation is trivial. You drive the green stake into the ground, then attach the wireless receiver to your controller box, which typically takes just two wires. Digital Sun's receiver can support a number of stakes, so you can maintain separate watering profiles for different types of plants. The rest of your watering system operates as normal.

Although Digital Sun claims to have implemented "light encryption", a particularly focused programmer might still be able to hack the signal. The wireless moisture sensing system will be available in May for around $150 for a single-stake unit, with additional stakes costing $50.

You can find more information about the system at Digital Sun's Web site.

Audio System Streams MP3s to Players 500 Feet Away

Eschewing 802.11 wireless technology for 900-MHz wireless, TerraDigital Systems took the wraps off two versions of its TerraPlayer at Demo. The first, the TerraPlayer Radio, combines a fancy boombox with MP3 playback, while the second sits in your stereo rack.

The TerraPlayer TR-100 Table Radio connects to your PC server and, through Windows file sharing, lets you browse and play back MP3 audio files. For a hefty $895, you get the TerraPlayer Radio and a USB wireless transceiver that plugs into your PC.

The unit includes a pretty nice-sounding set of stereo speakers and a subwoofer as well. A 6.2-inch, 640-by-240-by-4,096 color display lets you navigate through your music. Although sketchy on details, the company claims to be working with Gracenote, so you can view CD covers and other graphics on the display.

TerraDigital opted to use 900-Mhz wireless technology rather than 802.11b for greater range. The company claims successful transmissions of up to 500 feet through walls and doors—a much greater effective range than that of 802.11b. A single PC and transceiver can support up to three separate radio devices. The wireless network operates digitally and uses frequency hopping to minimize interference from other 900-Mhz peripherals in your house.

The unit itself has no local storage—all music is streamed from your PC server, which can be running Linux, Unix, Mac OS/10, or Microsoft Windows (most flavors).

The device also acts as an AM/FM radio, which makes it very similar to Bose's family of Wave Radios, but with MP3 streaming replacing CD capability. There are RCA-style analog output jacks, but—oddly for a digital device—you won't find an SP/DIF optical or coax connector.

TerraDigital also showed off a version of the player, the TerraPlayer CR-100 Component, that doesn't include speakers but does offer digital output. The $795 device is designed to sit in your audio component rack and talk to a stereo or home-theater receiver. The CR-100 also includes the color display, but does not have a television-output option. The company is working on including that in a future release.

The units are nicely designed but expensive and limited, currently supporting only MP3. The company may add WMA and other audio formats in the future. Although an all-in-one device may be appealing to audiophiles with disposable cash, a low-end notebook PC with 802.11b and a set of powered speakers can offer similar functionality at around the same cost. Still, because of the simplicity and strong interface design of its products, TerraDigital Systems could make them contenders, much as Bose has convinced consumers of the superiority of a $300 AM/FM radio. The TerraDigital units will be available later this spring. We'll have a complete review of the units when they are finished.

You can find more information about the audio system at TerraDigital Systems' Web site.

Oddpost Makes Webmail Real

Modern e-mail clients have a number of great features, including preview windows, spam killers, and drag-and-drop folder interfaces that make reading and managing e-mail easy. But when you move to the Web-based versions of these systems—Outlook's WebMail, for example—or to an HTML e-mail system, many of those niceties fall away. Instead, you have to load every e-mail sequentially with a separate screen, spam becomes overwhelming, and the typical Windows-based functions no longer work.

But at Demo, a company called Oddpost Inc. rolled out an interesting Web e-mail service and client with capabilities that rival those of Outlook or Outlook Express, including drop-down menus, spam detection and removal, a preview pane, and the ability to move from message to message quickly without reloading the entire screen. The product also supports drag-and-drop mail functions, which let you easily manage messages using folders.

Oddpost, implemented with a combination of DHTML, XML, and SOAP, communicates with the Oddpost servers. The e-mail client runs only in Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher, but gives users rich access to e-mail, requiring no plug-ins, downloads, or software installations on the client.

Oddpost is also building a corporate version that will sit next to an Exchange or other IMAP server and provide the same Web-based functions to business e-mail users. The middleware server, which the company expects to roll out later this year, runs on Linux. Pricing hasn't been set. The box does the IMAP-to-SOAP/XML translation as well as user provisioning and spam filtering.

Oddpost plans on rolling out additional productivity applications, including products for calendaring as well as for contact and to-do list management, in the near future.

You can see a complete demo at Oddpost's site.

Copyright ?? 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.