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In this issue
J'acuzzi !
Fight for Town Hall
Diane Abbott writes
Festival News
News In brief
Stand-off on the 73
To Russia with Love
Mr Kite
Newcomer
Old Silver Screen
Caribbean Cuisine
Clean Sheets
The Library
Write On
Straight to the Point
Gardening
Speak Out
Shimmy into Shape
Tech Talk
Online Banking
Fighting the Flames
Rough with Smooth
Poetic Justice
Scams of the Month
North Bank
Crossword

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OnLine Edition
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Tech Talk

by Zoran Jevtic

p14

Windows 2000 sales hit 1 million

Windows 2000 ­ desktop, server and advanced server versions ­ has already sold more than 1 million. This figure includes the sales through retail outlets, resellers and computer makers, but not big customers that deploy the software though upgrade.

PC sales booming due to the Internet

In the old days people bought PCs to do computing but now buyers seem to want all things ­ mainly Internet which is now driving the industry growth. Consumers are now buying PCs specifically to get connected. By contrast, many PC owners in past years had no intention of getting on the web and everyone thought that consumers would abandon their PCs for small, cheap Net computers. In the next five years, going online will be as common as making a telephone call as the sales of notebooks and handhelds are expected to double.

Talking of handhelds, another revolution is happening as we speak...

The latest generation of PDAs are able to connect to the Internet and WAP services without any extra hardware! The days of downloading news and books for reading them on the tube are very near. These pocket-sized companions are far more than personal organizers and function as powerful extensions of your desktop or notebook computer to keep you informed, entertained and productive. Combining touch-sensitive colour screens, handwriting recognition, memory of up to 64Mb, latest software, services and network connectivity, these devices can send and receive e-mails or fax, carry contacts, appointments and many applications, while some can even take digital photographs and play your favourite albums as MP3 audio files. Most are easily connected to desktops via the ubiquitous USB (see previous issue) or infrared beam. Users already exchange their business cards, web addresses or even recipes just by pointing their PDAs at each other and beaming the information!

Adobe PDF, electronic document distribution format, is a compact file system that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colours, and graphics of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. The document can be shared, viewed and printed exactly as intended by anyone using a free reader software. And guess what? PDF is coming to every handheld computer running Windows CE! PDF files are very popular with documentation departments, are incredibly easy to create and they save time, money, and headaches. A program called Primer allows you to read PDF files on your Windows CE device.

While in the portable domain, let's mention digital cameras. Staying connected to friends, family, and business associates far away is now easy, hassle free and can be had at a mere £30. A camera can quickly be detached and reattached to your desktop or laptop computer, making it simple to send clear, high-quality still and moving images over the Internet, make video calls, send video e-mail, or post video snapshots on a Web site anywhere, anytime. What's more, you can use them outside and store hundreds of photos that can be selectively deleted, previewed, re-taken and printed in real photo-quality. Try that with an ordinary film camera!

Convenient features such as USB hot-swap capability and detachable cabling provide ultimate portability. The latest digital cameras employ up to 3 megapixel sensors for very high resolutions and are able to take pictures of text in black and white for OCR (Optical Character Recognition where a computer converts an image into a text), digital and analog zoom, macroshot (for photographing very close objects), thumbnail previews and removable memory.

What is WAP?

WAP is a new mobile version of the Internet. With a mobile phone or a handheld PC that supports WAP you can book tickets, order a pizza and check your bank account, while on the bus, beach, or work. The information is requested and sent as needed, so one can search for news, weather forecasts, exchange rates and even play games on the go. Advanced WAP phones incorporate an infrared interface for exchanging the information with laptops or PDAs. WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol - a global standard developed to make Internet services available for mobile users (check www.rtse.com ).

WAP is essentially based on Internet technology and any Internet site can make its information available to mobile users by making their pages WAP compatible. Services are accessed via WAP enabled mobile phones available from a number of manufacturers. WAP mobiles have a large graphic display and include a compact web browsing software that displays the information or runs an application just like a full-blown desktop browser.


Zoran runs Audiografix multimedia consultancy. ( info@audiografix.com )

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