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by: Ernest Lilley Date: 01/13/03
(originally published on Byte.com, March 28, 2001 reprinted with permission of the author)
Website: CeBIT / Article
Summary: In March, 2001, I took a group of Byte.com journalists to CeBITand came back with lots to say and photo coverage galore.
CeBIT is Europe's Largest Technology Show, held in Hannover, Germany each year. This year (2003) it will be coming to NYC in the spring, so we thought that a look back might be in order to bring you up to speed.
Article: CeBIT 2001 Words and Pictures
Armed with a collection of digital cameras* and my new Lexar 256 mb Compact Flash card, I journeyed from New Jersey to Amsterdam to Hannover, Germany in search of CeBIT, the world's largest Computer and Trade show. Along the way, Alex Pournelle, Eric Pobirs and I found ultra new high tech that won't be built until tomorrow, cities that were built before America was colonized, the world's second largest internet cafe, and great sights of all sorts.
I took a lot of pictures on this trip...and the next few pages represent only a fraction of my total shooting. So, welcome to the best of my CeBIT 2001 Photo Coverage.
At the Fair
Bluetooth is Everywhere
Digital Cameras
Displays
Handhelds / Symbian
R&D Hall
Compaq
SonyWe get around
CeBIT Follies
Amsterdam Sights* My main camera was a Nikon 990, but I used a Olympus 3040 as well on some of the Amsterdam coverage. Look for file names that start with P31800..JPG. Color and Contrast was cleaned up in Photoshop 5.5)
Spring wasn't quite in the air, which hovered around 0 degrees C, and alternated between rain and snow. You can upload show directories at most major trade shows, but only to Palm and CE OS devices. At CeBIT, though, I was able to get info for an Epoch 32 device, which shows the European market strength of the Symbian OS. A number of companies used CeBIT as part of their recruiting effort, but the Sun Microsystems recruiting ad above, "Dot-Com Your Career" seems an unfortunate choice of words in changing times. Of course, you may go far bragging about how great you are and spending money like a sailor, but the odds are against it.
Bluetooth Bonanza: True, most of the actual products shipping or scheduled are USB dongles, or PC Cards to provide Bluetooth connectivity, but this was the first time that everyone had a Bluetooth solution for their products, right down to the Stollmann (www.stollmann.de) Bluetooth coffee carafe, which will tell you temperature and volume. Canon's digital camera linked successfully to a Bluetooth printer and IBM killed two birds with one stone by showing the technology demonstrator Linux/Bluetooth wristwatch.
CeBIT follows close on the heels of DIMA/PMA, a major photographic show (see my coverage at: www.byte.com/feature/BYT20010213S0004) held in Orlando. As a result there aren't a lot of major camera releases, but everybody's there to show off the products to the Euro-market. Nikon did their usual full court press with a catwalk and fashion show along with a pro-photo studio and models, and showed off the various uses for their cameras besides fashion. Here a Nikon 990 works with a stereo-microscope. Olympus released the C-700, a 10x optical zoom camera with an ISO (film speed) equivalent of 800, which makes it a really fast camera. The LCD-Viewer, a simple but clever hood for viewing the LCD on the back of your digital camera was being shown around the floor by it's developer, Dr. Jochen Muller, who's looking for a company to hook up with (archivjmue@aol.com). Toshiba introduced a pair of cameras as well, the M65 3.3 (megapixel) and M61 (2.3 megapixel).
LCD displays dominate everything but the desktops of the world, owing to their still greater expense compared to CRT displays. They may be cheaper in the long run when you factor in service life and power requirements. At CeBIT I saw the Sharp BLACK TFT displays for the first time and was blown away by the way they render colors. The ultra black matrix allows for really deep color saturation. Sharp's news of the show was the release of a 20" (19.6" diag.) version with a 1600x1200 resolution, 48 W power consumption, and summer availability. 4D-Vision GmbH was also displaying at the Sharp booth with a modified LCD display that did an excellent job of showing 3D with no funny glasses required. 4D takes apart the display, inserts a special mask over the LCD and puts it all back together to create the first 3D display I've seen that really works. They lose some resolution in the process, probably by tasking different pixels to provide different view angles, but it's a very workable solution and can only get better as display resolution increases. The Olympus Eye-Trek isn't just for TV anymore...now they've teamed it up with the Sony Play Station II for a total immersion gaming environment that blew my mind. To quote Keanu Reeves, sage philosopher of Science Fiction Film...."Whoa."
What looks like an Access Qube (Byte.com: Invasion Of The Pen Computers http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20000818S0003), feels like a Qube (though lighter) and works like a Qube? The Innolabs Evita does. Were they separated at birth? Actually, yes. "We did the development for Qube," says Y.T. Lee, CEO. But this version is much lighter, which is a welcome improvement as weight has been on of David Em's chief complaints. Tablet PCs may well be the next big thing, so this is an area to keep an eye on. 
Little Case, Big Drive: Toshiba's 2 GB PC card drive generated a lot of interest among the portable crowd. Pocket Mail: Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution. Pocket mail uses an acoustic coupler to get your email off any phone that has a mouthpiece and a speaker, just like in the bad old days. 
Going, going, gone. The Sharp "Multimedia Tool" prototype has a clever keyboard that slides away when you don't need it. Just as important, it has an embedded Bluetooth link to provide internet and device access. Sharp minds indeed. 
HP released a slightly simpler version of its Jornada 720, the 710, which doesn't include the 56k modem and should cost a tad less. With so many different connectivity options in the works, this almost makes sense to me. Better to connect via a Bluetooth dongle, or 802.11 PC card. Shown is a Jornada 720 with a Nokia GPRS connectivity card able to websurf and email on the go. One of the coolest applications of biometrics I saw was this Handspring Visor with fingerprint recognition built as a technology demonstrator by Fingerprint Cards (www.fingerprint.se). The demonstrator worked fast and smooth, and they have a full line of solutions available for other devices. 
At the Symbian (www.symbian.com) booth, they were demonstrating the new 6.1 release of the Epoch OS, which includes Bluetooth and GPRS support and a one hand friendly format for phones and palm style devices. Paul Cockerton, head of communications for the cooperative, spent some serious time with me discussing the future of handheld OSs in the face of a G3 cell phone market that failed to materialize, at least on schedule. 
The Symbian/Epoch based Nokia 9210, a fully capable web browsing cell phone with a terrific display. We were watching an mpeg of "Charlies Angels" on the screen from a CF card. Not available in the US until we get GPRC or GSM in a big way. Sigh. 
Psion, maker of PDAs with keyboards, is at home in Europe, where they still have a substantial market share. Though the lost their development deal with Motorola earlier this year, they're forging ahead with projects on their own. Upper left: I've never actually used my 5mx to browse the web across an IR link to a cell phone, since US phones rarely have this feature. I sent myself email, just to say I'd done it. Look Ma, no keyboard! Psion displayed some ideas from their think tank about the future of their product line. 
Xybernaut: XyberPres Tod Rehm looks on at the Best of CeBIT awards, hosted by computer magazine CHIP, whose logo reminds me of something, but I can't quite put my finger on it. The Xybernaut transferable core (shown in a 15% oversize prototype) placed, but didn't quite show. Still, it marks the entry of Xybernaut's wearable computers in the consumer/office space, which should be interesting (www.xybernaut.com). I was pleased that they remembered me from last year's coverage (INSERT LINK TO ERN'S CEBIT COVERAGE 2000), when I took the models from their Xyber-Fashion-Show and combined them with Nikon's Pro-Studio exhibit to come up with life sized posters of biker babes with wearable computers. Euro marketing manager Bernard Wiedmann tells me that one of my pictures is sitting in their boardroom in a place of honor. Research & Development
Out of the Lab: There was an entire hall devoted to R&D Transfer, and you can read more about it in Alex Pournelle's upcoming CeBIT 2001 report. The sights above caught my eye, starting with a Robot competition for German schoolchildren sponsored by the Universität Rostock in the upper left. What could the big robot arm above be handling? A) Urainum slugs B) Toxic waste C) Dwarf Star Matter D) Envelopes. (see below) The Canon Research Centre Europe (www.cre.canon.co.uk) is developing a program that translates simple digital photographs into a solid 3D object using only a piece of reference paper, a normal digital camera and a PII computer with 64mb of ram. Developer Allan Davison (shown above) is working with partners in the UK to develop a new 3D storage format that increases the degree of rendition when an object is at rest. Daimler-Chrysler and GMD Fokus packed a whole lot of computer inside a Mercedes/Swatch "Smart" car in a techno-parody of a college stunt gone wrong. Fine, but where do you fit the people?
The Compaq Museum on tour: the first "schleppable" computer. Compaq iPAQ doing onboard navigation. It ran at a blazing 4 mHz, but before you laugh too hard, just remember that it got the job done. Nestled in the cockpit of a BMW Z3 roadster is the Compaq TEGARON navigation system, which provides navigation, traffic, email and WAP access. Take away the BMW and the system coordinates with local access points to provide information in a museum...or even...a store. 
Big Iron for the new millennium: Hot plug raid memory slides in and out of a Compaq server. In fact the only thing that doesn't hot plug in their new servers is the CPU, and they have a prototype that does that as well. Rack Mounted web servers, pre-configured and ready to go Second row: It's not pretty, except in a prototype sort of way, but the W2K Datacentre Solution lets you scale "up" or "out" and provides "fail-safe" solutions for critical applications. Though Germans have a limited appreciation of irony, associating the phrase Fail-Safe with computer has an unfortunate historical precedent they may wish to avoid. If you do not watch old movies, you are doomed to repeat them. I only hope that their next system isn't called Colossus. 
Compaq is certainly all about Infrastructure, and as a system manager myself I love the layout of these machines, especially the fold away LCD display that slides back into the rack and the pull out trays for hot swapping components. (For a deeper look into Compaq's CeBIT offerings, see Alex Pournelle's continuing coverage.)
Sony brought the world's biggest robot pet to the show, but unfortunately it didn't actually dance like the actual Aibo. Maybe that was a good thing. The Music Clip gets a new shape and more memory, they've introduced the Clié in Europe, but not in color. Going for groovy, they've also introduced the Vaio PCG-QR10 with a dark maroon case, white keys, and bright silver trim -- including a handle. Personally, I've always wanted d-clips so I could just put a shoulder strap on my laptop. The Mavica line continues it's philosophy of using media that's easy to swap with a CD-RW built into the newest models.
Getting there is half the fun, and getting around can be either a pleasure or a pain. Modes of transport in Euope range from practical (walking and biking) to exotic (Audi TT coupe). We rented a VW Passat Wagon (stick, thank you) and drove the Autobahn from Amsterdam to Hannover. Once there, we avoided traffic by taking advantage of the free public transit, which works great. At the fair, I borrowed a scooter. The bike in the bottom is a prototype VW was exhibiting at the Hannover Design Center, located on the fair grounds.
Men in Black (Compaq security), Men in Red (greeters) and a Man in Big Yellow Shoes (that would be me). 
Plenty to Watch: Toy Story II fought off Dinosaur for LCD demo dominance. A Bug's Life was still hanging on by a feeler. There were lots of friendly frauleins, at the show and it may be true that , while blondes had more fun, as they have the numerical advantage in Northern Europe.
We flew into Amsterdam on the way to CeBIT, because the Hannover aiport is small and the fare large. While we were there we made the most of it, checking out the local tech scene and taking in the sights. 
Fine food, low prices, my kind of town: Medallion of beef in hollandaise sauce, about $12 US, Sorbet in crunchy Tulip pastry shell, about $5 US, Peace and quiet of room service at the Golden Tulip Hotel. Amsterdam Center...priceless. 
Amsterdam is a city of thrifty shoppers, and even the eateries can be really reasonable. I found this all-you-can-eat Dim Sum place by a canal, and we made out pretty well, for three growing boys. 
City of Bikes: everyone bikes in Amsterdam, and they don't all ride fancy moutain bikes. Most are just comfortable commuter one speeds that get you where you're going. It's a great example of sustainable technology with positive side effects. There may be out of shape Amsterdammers somewhere, but they don't appear to let them out. 
Nemo (New Metropolis) Science Museum: Amsterdam has plenty of Museums, including the Van Gogh, which is properly pronounced like you're choking to death or have Klingon ancestry. Alex took in the art museums, but I wanted to see science. The Nemo is a great interactive museum where we played with bubbles, floated balls on air, wrote with lasers, trained for industry, wore funny glasses and played interactive games with museum goers across a global network. It's aimed at children, so it was perfect for us.
