. . . cont'd from Hot News My advice? Don't even think about adopting Blu-Ray or HD-DVD until late 2006 or early 2007. And even then, don't buy anything until it's clear that the major hardware makers—companies like Pioneer for instance—are offering drives that handle both formats. And even then, don't buy anything until you're absolutely sure that the physical media in the form of recordable Blu-Ray or HD-DVD discs, are actually available. And even then, wait for the faster, second generation devices to come out. Our recent experiences with DVD plus & minus recordable media is a case in point. The manufacturers were coming out with faster drives every 4 months or so over the past three years. The drive you purchased yesterday was almost literally obsolete today, except for the fact that you could still only purchase the slower speed media. 8X DVD recordable media is still hard to find. The industry has become slightly stupid. Some business consumers are left to wander around stores, brows furrowed, staring intently at the products on the shelves, unsure of what to purchase. My advice? When in doubt, purchase nothing at all. Above all else, do not accept the advice of the 19 or 20 year old store clerk. Turn to Kickstartnews news for technical advice, read our product reviews, and if you've got the time, ask us to review a specific product you're thinking of purchasing.

Watch out for Google, but don't hand your office desktop software needs to an online provider too quickly. You need a fast data connection to the Internet to match the speeds of OpenOffice, Microsoft Office or WordPerfect Office installed on a typical Pentium 4, Mac G5 or MacIntel desktop computer.

Smartphones, cell phones, MP3 & video players, televisions, laptops and other convergent devices will be running amok in the marketplace throughout 2006. You're going to see some interesting convergence taking place which might be of interest to home-office people. First, and perhaps most intriguing, several television manufacturers are going to be coming out with TVs containing servers. That's right—a television which includes a computer, thereby providing a central point for streaming media directly into the TV and its connected sound system. Smart idea and one that I think I'm going to take a close look at. It will certainly eliminate any desire to install yet another mini- or mid-tower Mac or PC in my living room or my own home-office space. That is, of course, if I really want to listen to compressed MP3 streaming off a hard drive somewhere in my home network rather than playing the original CD that's on the shelf in my living room! LG and Viewsonic in particular are ramping up production of TVs containing server technology and 160GB and larger hard drives, enabling built-in Tivo-like functionality and personal video recorder features and enabling streaming media from your home network. If you're in the market for a TV this year, I'd wait until the very end of the year. Prices will be lower, resolutions will be higher, and built-in computer features will be more widely available.

EV-DO, the new wide area wireless networking technology, is going to be appearing in lots of notebook and laptop computers throughout 2006. Look for device conflicts, driver screw-ups and miscellaneous compatibility issues until EV-DO fully replaces WiFi 802.11 a & g for public applications (three years from now? Four? Five?). EV-DO and WiFi are being offered together in the same machine, which looks the most likely ongoing situation at this point. EV-DO works well at this time and appears to be the solution that everyone is going with for the next few years. But EV-DO is an expensive roll-out for the providers and outside of a few key technology areas around the world, you're not going to see anything resembling comprehensive deployment until late 2007. As with all new technologies, particularly wireless technologies, I'd wait until the second generation of EV-DO devices are available in late 2006. Unless you've got an unassailable need for wide-area networking use right now, let the early adopters blow their money instead of you.

Portable multimedia devices, including iPods from Apple, Treos from Palm, and Windows Mobile devices are going to dominate the wireless phone and PDA market. The fact is, Apple could literally own darn near the entire market in each segment—music player, video player, PDA and smartphone—if it added a transceiver, keypad and larger screen to the new iPod 30GB. In the meantime, the audio subsystem in my Treo 650 and in the just-released Windows Mobile-based Treo 700W is quite good. Add a 1GB SD storage card and you've got your best bang for the buck in a multimedia, multifunction business device. RIM's Blackberry devices are way off the mark these days compared to the appeal of the Treos in my opinion, except for the seamless and no-wait manner in which the Blackberry handles e-mail. If you really use a PDA now, along with a Smartphone and a music player, it's time you considered converging them. My advice? Have a look at the Treo 650 and 700w.

Most intriguing of all is the release of the new Google Pack. In case you hadn't noticed, Google is more than merely a search engine. In fact, the company and its online presence are being positioned as a destination point—a mega-program really—for anyone who wants to get things done with their computer. The Google Pack consists of the Firefox web browser, a special version of Norton Antivirus, the Picasa photo organizer, the marvelous Google Earth, the Google Desktop Companion for searching your entire hard drive and network, the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer plug-in, Lavasoft's AdAware antispyware utility, the Trillian instant messaging software compatible with all other IMs, the GalleryPlayer, Google Pack Screensaver, RealPlayer multimedia player, and Adobe Acrobat Reader v7. While almost all of this stuff is freely available separately, Google has packaged it so that only one updater runs in the background on your computer. As well, the Norton antivirus updates will continue, basically, forever, unlike the regular retail version of Norton Antivirus which requires a paid subscription renewal each year.

But my overriding prediction about Google's assault on the PC desktop in 2006 is that the company is shortly going to be releasing online versions of word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation software—an office suite for home, home-office and small business users in other words—which will allow Google to begin competing directly with Microsoft's dominance of the office desktop, and all at very little cost to you (if it even costs anything at all). My advice? Watch out for Google, but don't hand your office desktop software needs to an online provider too quickly. You need a fast data connection to the Internet to match the speeds of OpenOffice, Microsoft Office or WordPerfect Office installed on a typical Pentium 4 or Mac G5 desktop computer. On the other hand, if Google is successful in creating and segmenting its own massive sub-Internet through a global chain of its own data centers (which it seems to be working on right now actually), even regular broadband access might make an online Google office suite a viable option for you. Have a look at the Google Pack now (the link is in the Show Notes) and by all means, watch out for Google's next moves in the office software market. I wonder what Microsoft is thinking right now?

Glad you asked. Microsoft seems to be thinking that it can succeed in the next phase of technology competition by making its various operating systems and browsers the primary enabling software on whatever cabled or wireless device you have to be using. With a Windows Mobile version of the Palm Treo, Microsoft seems to suddenly be in position to be the dominant force in the Smartphone and handheld computing market. That Microsoft had the good sense to partner with Palm to supplant Palm's own operating system is a terrific coup and something that Research In Motion (RIM, the Blackberry) may not have completely anticipated. Of course there's more than enough room in the marketplace for both operating systems to thrive. Where does that leave Symbian (the other operating system)? It's probably sufficient to state that not everybody needs or even wants a big screen and a big handheld and a PDA, etc., etc. For tens of millions of people, a typical smartphone (music player, digital camera, video camera and phone) is perfect.

Microsoft does not appear to be planning any movement into the online application market with Microsoft Office, so don't look for online versions of Word and Excel any time soon. So don't look for any competition with Google's predicted foray in this area. On the other hand, with Microsoft so clearly dominant on the home and office desktop, and with thousands of new home and office desktops appearing every day around the world, Microsoft has no real peer in this huge segment. Literally, the only competition Microsoft faces directly is from the open source (and completely free) OpenOffice.org. Go figure.

Now . . . what about some other more conventional concerns? Well there's the digital camera market to consider for 2006. Not much new there. If you've already got a decent 4 0r 5 megapixel camera already, keep the lens clean, buy a bigger storage card if you need it and keeping using camera until next year. The same thing is true for video cameras. Unless you're using digital photography or video as part of your business, keep using your current setup. My advice? The changes for 2006 are incremental only and the so-called law of diminishing returns seems to have kicked in for all but the most demanding professional photographers and videographers.

If you're already running Windows XP with service pack 2, or Mac OS X Tiger, or the latest Linux desktop version from Xandros or Red Hat, don't worry, be happy. Processors from Intel and AMD are getting faster and faster. It's the same with video cards and hard drives. And hard drives are getting bigger too - much bigger. Retail prices continue to fall. But Microsoft Office, WordPerfect Office, your web browser, e-mail and so on are not going to run any faster if you dump your Pentium 4 in favor of a faster Pentium 4. You're going to be better off in 2006 by doing comparatively minor and much less expensive RAM and hard drive upgrades to existing computers. Outside of that, keep your money in your pocket until Windows Vista, the next Mac OS X and the new Macs based on Intel processors and the next major Linux kernel updates appear. That's all happening early in 2007. My advice? Unless you've got some truly heavy duty applications for all this technology—high resolution photo or video editing, massive database management, or serious desktop publishing for example—you don't have to spend much money on new computers during 2006.

The newest product sub-segment to appear in 2006 seems to be occupied by laser multifunction print/scan/fax machines. If any of these new machines from Samsung, Lexmark and HP live up to some of the promise shown in early models, we'll finally be able to regain some of that valuable office table and desk space lost to multiple devices. Color lasers have come down dramatically in price, but I strongly recommend staying away until the price of replacement color toner cartridges comes down as well. A single replacement color toner cartridge is often the same as the original price of the printer—an ongoing cost which will destroy most small office budgets. My advice? Stay away from color lasers because of toner cost and poor photo printing performance compared to cheap color inkjets, but have a close look mid-year at the laser-based multifunction devices.

It's January 14, 2006 as I write this and Apple Corp. just rolled out the first of its Intel-based computers. This rollout is taking place several months earlier than predicted. The new machines are fast, fast, fast and run Mac OS X at breakneck speed. It's a wonderful thing to match up an elegant computer operating system with some seriously beefy processing power. Watch for Macs to continue chipping away at Windows PCs throughout the year. Note too that although there are always a few complaints, Apple has provided Mac software developers of all sizes, shapes and descriptions with excellent support to help them move their products with as little fuss as possible onto the new hardware platform. I had a look inside one of the new Intel-based Macs by the way. Gorgeous. My next laptop is going to be an Intel-based MacBook. Can't resist.

Last but not least, go out and buy yourself a Buffalo, Linksys, Netgear, Western Digital, Maxtor or SimpleTech Network Area Storage device. Forget about a server for your home-office. With one of these NAS babies, many businesses will be able to do just fine without a server. Network Area Storage devices are small boxes containing an Ethernet network connection and one or two hard drives, along with a couple of USB 2 Hi-Speed ports to add additional storage capacity. The motherboard in the device usually contains a rudimentary Linux operating system which allows it to hook up with almost any Windows or Mac network. Use the device as a general storage area for all your files and data. These NAS boxes cost less than three hundred dollars in many cases and provide hundreds of gigabytes of almost fully automated storage. Between one of these things, a Google online word processor, and a MacBook, I'll be set for life (or at least the next twelve months)!

Have a healthy and prosperous 2006. Caveat Emptor!

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