Back in the 1930s, when Dick Tracy phoned friends with his wristwatch telephone, high-tech dreams flooded the comics. But Dick Tracy couldn't receive an electronic message like "Hey, Tracy: LOL! Signed, Pruneface."
Timex's new Internet Messenger watch enables the user to receive not only baffling instant messages on his wrist but also numerical and text pages, Internet e-mail, and Yahoo updates on stocks, weather, news and sports. The watch, which costs US$119, harnesses technology from Motorola and SkyTel to receive and store up to 16 messages or 1,350 total characters. The watch, which has the styling of Timex's Ironman Triathalon line, includes a nighttime backlight, a stopwatch and five alarm settings. It can also set and maintain the correct time wherever you are.
DVD player doubles as a VCR
The march of technology can be a wonderful thing, unless you are tight on space. In that case, the thought of giving up your trusty old VCR for a flashy new DVD player may leave you anxious: You fear you may never be able to watch those homemade vacation videotapes again.
Samsung Electronics has a new product, the DVD-V1000, that may ease your mind. It is a combination DVD player-VCR that takes up about as much space as most DVD or videotape units. It will also play audio CDs (including those in MP3 format) and video CDs. All for about $300.
Although there are other combination DVD-VCR machines on the market, Samsung claims that its model is the first with a single output jack, meaning there is no need to swap cables when you switch from I Know What You Did Last Summer on disc to I Know What I Did Last Summer on tape.
Run Mac programs on Windows
Apple loyalists might consider selling Windows software at a Macintosh trade show akin to a Hatfield's showing up at a McCoy family reunion. But SoftMac Xpress, unveiled last week by Emulators Inc at MacWorld Expo in New York, is the latest version of software that lets Windows users run Macintosh programs and open Mac files on their Windows machines. The new program, SoftMac Xpress, will work with Windows 98 and 2000 and the next version of Windows XP.
Emulation software does just what the name implies: emulate or mimic a different operating system so users can run programs written for other systems without having to purchase new computers. Like its predecessor, SoftMac 2000, SoftMac Xpress works with the older 68K Macintosh programs but not with software written for PowerPC. (A PowerPC emulator is expected later this year.)
SoftMac Xpress is 30 percent faster than the previous version, and users can drag and drop files between the Macintosh and Windows screens on their computers. The upgrade for SoftMac 2000 users costs US$100 and the full version costs US$400.
Both can be ordered at www.emulators.com. Shipping is to begin in August.
As far as emulators go, Macintosh users are probably more in need of Windows emulation software than Windows users are of Mac access. Mac addicts using the Virtual PC 4.0 program by Connectix to run Windows programs on their machines can download a free test version of Virtual PC designed for Mac OS X at www.connectix.com.
One connection, many PCs
Netgear (www.netgear.com) has released new wireless networking devices for people who don't want to be tethered to a wired network but still want to share reliable video and audio streams through their home high-speed cable or DSL connection.
The WE102 base station (US$199.99) and WA301 network card (US$149.99) are for home users who want to stream audio and video signals on more than one computer but don't want to run networking cable through their home.
Although there are other devices that provide wireless networking, most are susceptible to interference from cordless phones, microwave ovens and the like. The new Netgear units have built-in tools that provide error correction and channel-hopping to avoid interference -- or at least reduce it.
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