02.29.00
Cool Tech
Feb 29 Tue (01 PM)
The latest cool thing I’ve seen:
<http://www.romeMP3.com/>
<http://www.active-components.com/new\_product.htm>
<http://www.mp-3.co.kr/english/product/>
It’s an MP3 player that has the form factor of a cassette player. That means you can have your MP3s and play them on anything that has a cassette player, which is still quite a lot of stuff at this point. Of course, there’s some fidelity issues and such but the concept is still pretty cool.
Plus it has a headphone jack so that it can be used as a standalone player. There’s supposed to be a newer version coming out which has an LCD display and more memory.
It’s too bad that it doesn’t have a USB connector. It seems to only support a strange PC only cable, so I won’t be getting it, but I can always hope that the next generation will have USB.
The underlying conecept here is that for magnetic media, you can simulate the megnetic encoding on the fly. There have been other examples of this like the FlashPath disc which adapts a SmartMedia card to a Floppy disk drive. Amy and I played with one of these during our flirtation with an Olympus digital camera. I hear that the company also has a floppy adapter for Sony’s MemoryStick format. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a CompactFlash oriented adapter as well.
But floppys are really slow and I don’t even have on on my G3. I’d like to see them work up something that can adapt to Zip disks. Then we’d have higher transfer rates, plus the Zip discs have a larger form factor that would be easier to work the electronics into.
It’s too bad that we won’t be able to do the same thing with CD or DVD players. They are optically based media rather than magnetically based. This means that some sort of dynamic reconfiguration of a visible surface would have to occur. This might be possible, but even then the _very_ thin size of the compact disc would make it very difficult to cram in all the necessary electronics. The same goes double for DVDs.
But it seems like, overall, USB connections would be the best bet. There are already a number of cheap USB readers for all of the previously mentioned solid state memory products. And USB has been really gathering steam as a connection technology.
With any luck, USB will be the last wired method of connecting pieces of electronics.
After that we can look towards Bluetooth and Wireless Ethernet. Then your electonics just have to be in the same room (house?) to recognize each other and work together.
I can imagine that wires will still dominate the higher end connection methods (UltraSCSI, FireWire, etc.), but it will be cool once we can eliminate the need for the lower speed devices to need wires. No more wires for keyboards, mice, graphics tablets, solid-state memory readers, mp3 players, lcd monitors, speakers, scanners, computer-to-computer connections, pda’s, vcr’s, stereo equipment, kitchen appliances, automobile diagnostics, home power regulation and generation systems, night lights, light fixtures, aquarium temperatures, security systems, doorbells, postal boxes, lawn watering systems…
Sorry, brain dump. 🙂
(Last thought: Then we’ll just need a wireless battery recharging method.)