Feeling Befuddled

The news dispatches from the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas did little to ease my mind about my obsessive reliance on a little hunk of metal. If anything, it seems like I'm doomed to a world filled with intelligent gadgets.

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HEATHER CLANCY

Can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

Sounding a lot like a Y2K-era Scott McNealy, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates detailed a series of "smart" devices he predicts will be on the market later this year. These include smart watches from Fossil, Citizen and Suunto that will provide traffic and weather data,aside from their primary function of keeping in exact sync with atomic time and reflecting new time zones,and refrigerator magnets that might receive school news bulletins or local restaurant menus via FM radio transmissions. Smart refrigerator magnets? And I thought they were just good for holding up embarrassing photos and child-crafted finger paintings.

Is nothing sacred?

The fact is, though, that this year will mark a turning point for the types of intelligent devices that account for the traffic on networks, particularly in the burgeoning wireless world.

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While most of us still think of measuring the success of the computing industry in terms of PC sales, it will become equally important to monitor the progress of handhelds, telephones, set-top boxes, gaming consoles and, yes, even wirelessly enabled watches and refrigerator magnets. In many cases, these devices will interact with a network and the Internet automatically, without human intervention, and communications initiated by and targeted at them will ultimately surpass those intended for what we have been used to thinking of as computers.

While I long for simplicity,frankly, I'm sick of reprogramming my fiance's telephone every time the battery dies,the good news is that complexity breeds all sorts of opportunity for solution providers. The challenges will be for the channel to define and assert its role as these products hit the market and to prepare to embrace new partners from the consumer electronics world.

HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, owns and uses several analog devices, including a record player. She welcomes feedback at [email protected].