innovations 1998

TAKE A QUICK INVENTORY of your most cherished toys and gadgets. How many will you still cherish in 12 months? Not all, we'll wager. Better, cheaper mousetraps abound. And even if you are not one to splurge on the latest gear, it's getting harder to resist whizzy wonders such as digital cameras and home DVD players. Take a look at Asiaweek's list of products and trends that shaped personal technology in 1998. It just might contain your favorite toy of 1999.

LEAPIN' LAPTOPS Laptop computer prices are falling faster than - well, faster than a dropped laptop computer. Packard Bell NEC recently broke the $1,000 barrier by offering a $999 mini-notebook, complete with Windows 98, a 200-MHz Cyrix processor, sound, 56-kbps modem, and both floppy and 24X CD-ROM drive. Portable PCs aren't just getting cheaper - they're becoming easier to carry. The Sony Vaio 505, a sub-three-pound model that is slim enough to slip easily into a briefcase, set the pace in 1998. In the coming year, there will be a wide selection of me-too minis. Full-featured laptops costing less than $1,000 will be stacked against similarly priced "Jupiter class" machines from Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Compaq, IBM and others - all running Microsoft's operating system for palmtop computers, Windows CE. Screens will be about 30% smaller than standard laptops. But unlike those on pocket PCs, Jupiter-class keyboards will be touch-type-friendly.

ROSES ARE RED, VIAGRA IS BLUE What does not need batteries but has helped thousands of men keep going and going? Viagra, Pfizer's little blue impotence pill. This year it demonstrated how pharmacological advances can enhance lives as well as save them. The best is yet to come as new medical breakthroughs portend a golden age of drug discovery; in the pipeline are more effective treatments for a host of conditions from cancer to baldness. Viagra is not widely available in Asia yet, but regulatory approval is expected in 1999 in Hong Kong, South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan - none too soon, given the recession and the region's severely deflated assets.

PIX-ELATION Digital cameras are developing into legitimate competition for 35 mm varieties. Sales jumped to 1.2 million units in 1998, up from 372,000 units in 1996. For good reason: filmless photography means snapshots go from camera to computer with no stop at the photo shop. Editing is easy with popular software programs, and most digicams allow you to display shots on your TV. Glossy prints are possible with inexpensive desktop printers and special paper. Unfortunately, many digital models are rather complicated to use and picture quality remains suspect for five-inch-by-seven-inch prints. But new megapixel cameras, some costing less than $500, can produce professional results ("pixel" stands for picture elements; higher-quality prints come from digicams that produce a million or more pixels per shot). Meanwhile, companies are bringing to market compact models that, unlike clunky predecessors, slip easily into a shirt pocket.

WORLD WITHOUT WIRES In the business community, where status is often defined by the gadgets one keeps, cutting-edge executives are paying up for Iridium, the first truly go-anywhere telephone handset. Iridium uses an orbital network of globe-girdling satellites to transmit phone calls, guaranteeing you can be reached almost anywhere (yes, even on your yacht) without worrying about roaming agreements or the alphabet soup of communications technologies that distinguish common mobile phones. It helps if you have a liberal expense account. Iridium phones cost at least $2,500 and calls are $3 a minute.

LP - CD - MP3? Vinyl records, eight-track tapes, cassettes, CDs, digital audiotape, MiniDiscs - how many music storage formats will the weary audiophile be asked to adopt? Just one more, perhaps. An emerging digital compression technology called MP3 makes it feasible to download music from the Internet and listen to it on portable players such as U.S.-based Diamond Multimedia's Rio or South Korea-based Saehan's MPMan. Unlike CD players, the devices contain no moving parts. The $200 Rio, for example, saves about an hour of "near-CD-quality" music on a 32MB memory chip. Using a computer, you can also copy your favorite tunes from your CD collection to the Rio, which is about the size of a cigarette pack and weighs a mere 2.4 ounces. As the price of solid-state memory chips continues to fall and e-commerce blossoms, many believe buying CDs at retail outlets will become passe - consumers will simply fetch tunes from the Internet and store them on recordable discs, generic memory cards or computer hard drives. But MP3 could be shunted by a wary recording industry, which fears the technology makes it too easy for people to illegally copy and distribute copyrighted music. An industry group, backed by Microsoft, America Online and other Internet heavyweights, has been formed to develop and promote a secure digital format.

DREAM ON Sega once dethroned Nintendo as the leading manufacturer of console video games, but in the last several years the company fell behind both Sony and Nintendo in the race for faster play and superior display. Time for a comeback. Sega recently launched Dreamcast, a $260 game machine with a 128-bit microprocessor and 3-D chip for "movie-quality" graphics. Theoretically twice as fast as the current speedburner, the Nintendo 64, Dreamcast includes an internal modem for multi-player gaming online and Internet access. "We will all see Dreamcast networking the world," predicted Sega president Irimajiri Shoichiro. Bold words. Success will likely depend on whether software developers can take advantage of the machines' hardware advances to produce hit games that are markedly more compelling than those available for the established Sony PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.

STYLE POINTS Apple Computer in 1998 posted its first profitable year since 1995 thanks largely to the hot-selling iMac. Although some critics derided the machine's missing parts (no floppy drive, limited ports for peripherals), first-time computer buyers loved the iMac's simplicity, reasonable price ($1,299), and futuristic design. They even loved that signature translucent blue case. In the U.S., where Time magazine named it 1998's "Machine of the Year," Apple's beige-buster outsold similarly configured PCs for three months running in big electronics stores. A counter-attack is coming. Intel, maker of the chips that power most non-Apple computers, has been showing off a fashionable PC prototype and reportedly has been urging manufacturers to show a little more design creativity in their new models.

BETTER LATE THAN BETAMAX We waited - how we waited - for the consumer electronics giants to settle their differences over competing formats and incompatible technologies. They finally did, and now DVD (Digital Video Disc), the successor to VHS tape, is ready for prime time. Prices for DVD players have fallen to less than $600. All the major movie studios are supporting the format, so content availability is no longer an issue. More than 1,600 titles - old and new releases - are available for purchase or rent. Movies recorded on DVD are striking more crisp than those on tape, even when displayed on big-screen TVs. DVD players still come with a catch. You can't record TV shows with them like you can with a VCR. And blurring the picture is Divx, a competing form of pay-per-view DVD that is being backed by some electronics outlets in the States. But in these days of rapid technological change, uncertainty is the price consumers pay for progress.

Ah, the beginning of a new year. Time to look towards the desktop and reflect upon the sad fact that if only you had waited, you could have bought a much more powerful and feature-packed computer for the same money. The illustration outlines the major specifications of the average top-drawer PC at the end of 1997, compared with those of a machine in the same category today.