News in Brief

Product Pipeline

Two DVD Drives in One: Look for the first multiformat rewritable-DVD drives to be on store shelves later this fall. Hitachi, Panasonic, and Samsung all expect to ship drives that can write to DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM, as well as to CD-R/RW; expect the drives to sell for between $300 and $500. What these multiple-format drives still lack, however, is the ability to write to the third leading rewritable format, DVD+RW/+R.

Wi-Fi PDA: The Toshiba Pocket PC E740 is the first personal digital assistant to ship with a built-in 802.11b (Wi-Fi) wireless adapter, which allows out-of-the-box Internet access via networks based on the popular standard. Carrying Intel's new 400-MHz PXA250 CPU for handhelds, the $599 device runs Microsoft's Pocket PC 2002 and comes with 64MB of RAM, as well as slots for CompactFlash and Secure Digital media.

Now Hear This: Best known for its mice, keyboards, and Webcams, Logitech is getting into the cell phone earpiece business. This fall the company will introduce a new line of wired and wireless headsets for popular cell phones. Prices are expected to range from $15 for an entry-level corded model to just under $100 for a cordless unit.

Shred On: You shred your company's sensitive papers before you trash them, but what about the digital information that resides on old CDs and DVDs? Now you can obliterate these files too, using Alera Technologies' $70 DVD/CD Shredder. Just as a paper shredder makes written documents unreadable, Alera's product obliterates a disc's data layers, rendering digital information undecipherable, though the disc is unharmed. Capable of handling up to 30 discs per minute, the DVD/CD Shredder should help ensure that the next Dumpster-diver to visit your business won't find anything important to take.

Did You Know?

No Kidding!: The PC industry shipped its 1 billionth personal computer earlier this year, according to research firm Gartner Dataquest. The milestone, a combination of desktop and notebook PC sales around the world, comes nearly 25 years after the 1974 introduction of the Altair PC--generally recognized as the first commercially successful PC. The 2 billion mark is expected to be reached much faster--in 2008, Gartner says.

Music will be the surprise killer application that will juice the home networking market, predicts research firm Jupiter Media Metrix. About 33 percent of broadband users that the firm polled were interested in installing a home network to listen to PC music files on home stereos, according to a Jupiter Research study, which also found that sharing broadband was the first reason to adopt a network.

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