Gadgets of 2002

oo7tushar writes "CNN has this article on some of the new gadgets we can expect to see in 2002. We can expect smaller MP3 players, more powerful cell phones. The biggest barrier remains the cost of the multifunction gadgets (quote - But until consumers -- and not just gearheads -- show a liking to these technologies, and their prices become affordable, some companies are focusing on devices that serve one function well. ") We can also expect evolution rather than revolution. The article has much more info."

Cool Tokyo phone can't work here.

[zulux]

Those cool Japanese phones all have a problem - the are very low power and have tiny antennas, and they wont work away from builtup urban centers with *tons* of cell towers. They don't even work on some Japanese college campuses due to the fact that they don't allow cell towers, and yet the phone can't use the tower just a few blocks away. They are a lot of fun, but they just wont work in the American market.

Re:"More powerful" != "Better."

[hoyosa]

Its funny you bring that up. I recently had the dilema of deciding which cellular phone provider to go with. In the end, I ended up with Sprint, just because of the fact that I could get a "big" phone. I thought all of the other phones they were trying to sell me were going to break.

Screw smallness!

[tempfile]

I don't want a smaller mp3 player. Current ones are just about the right size. I want a digital music player with at least 128MB, *BIG* display, Ogg Vorbis support, fast USB connection, and an open interface that can be easily accessed from non-Windows systems as a block device. I also want good sound quality. Will there be such a thing? I highly doubt it. Why is it that manufacturers of portable devices think that smaller automatically equals better? Cell phones suffer the same problem. Why does nobody care about the factors that actually make up quality anymore?