Technology Corner

Beam Me Up Scottie

If you have seen an episode of Star Trek, you will no doubt have seen their use of what they call communicators. This ingenious piece of kit enables them to stay in contact with each other and obtain any information they require from the main computer. As well as this, the little arrow shaped lapel badge manages to keep the central computer informed as to the exact location of it's wearer, essential for the matter transference beam. While I am a big fan of Star Trek, I think it will be a long time before we see anything that comes close to this wonderful device. For a start, I have never once seen them recharge the damn things, and I have never quite worked out how the computer decides when the user has stopped speaking into the badge and directed the conversation elsewhere.

To date we have seen a few PDA's (Personal Digital Assistants) arrive on the scene heralded by a surge of hype and promises about the way they will change our lives. Most of them have already faded away into insignificance for a number of reasons. One reason is that most PDA's are little more than an address book crossed with a calculator with a little bit of calendar thrown in. Now this is all very well but most people find it a great deal easier not to bother. The more glamorous PDA's that use things like writing analysis, were doomed to failure from the start. They weren't very good at recognizing your hand writing at the best of times and when they did, it was time to change the batteries.

So, is there hope for the techno junkies among us, will things get better? The chip manufacturers think they will and soon.

The developers at Motorola have recently unveiled their much talked about low power variant of the PowerPC processor. Oh good, I hear you cry. Well, Motorola says that this particular silicon beast can handle 53 million instructions per second (MIPS) and comes complete with some extra circuitry that will enable the processor to perform exceptionally well when handling communications and things like continuous speech recognition.

Advanced RISC Machines (ARM), Motorola's UK based rival is currently dropping hints that it will be releasing a 70 MIPS processor before the end of the year. This might just impress you but then Hitachi comes along and announces it's intention to release it's own PDA chip that will, allegedly, be capable of speeds of up to 300 MIPS at the power cost of just 1 Watt.

All of this may not really get you excited but what is important to remember is we already have the ability to recognize speech and handwriting to a certain degree. It is only a matter of putting a powerful processor into the equation and you are left with something that might actually start assisting you.

The potential of these machines goes beyond the current limitations of PDA's. Owners of PDA "the next generation" will be able to utilize digital video and any form of sound management such as Voicemail. Via a wireless modem, users will be able to fully access the Internet, send faxes and stay in touch with the office network as well as everyone in general. By keeping in touch with a central database the PDA can utilize a vast amount of information without having to carry around the hardware to store it, which vastly expands it's horizons.

There is a downside however, it won't be hard for the office to keep tabs on their employees either. Ever heard of the expression "Big brother is watching you", soon he will be listening as well.

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