Tikkabik

Sorry that I've been incommunicado for the past few days (but I'm not self-absorbed enough to think that you've been pining for my ramblings while i've been gone). On Wednesday of last week I went down to New York City for a couple of days to visit Digital Life, a new consumer expo put on by Ziff-Davis that took place at the Javits Center, the old home of Macworld Expo.

It was a small show (by Javits Center standards, anyway), taking up about the same square footage as 2002's Macworld Expo, minus all the conference tracks and other stuff going on. Most of the vendors who were there were pushing PC-centric products or products that don't have much if anything to do with computers at all -- flat panel televisions, DVD players you can wear, a robotic version of Hello Kitty and other fun stuff.

Outside of a scoop regarding ATI's display of a Radeon X800 card in a Power Mac G5, the show was a bust from the news perspective, though I got to meet some interesting folks doing some pretty cool things. Probably the thing that caught my eye the most was a product called hip-e, a PC-compatible computer whose maker claims it's the first ever specifically designed for teenage kids. It has a pretty elegant industrial design for an all-in-one PC (many Mac snobs sneer at it, which is all too predictable), and sports some nifty features, such as plugs where you can attach a flash media player and cell phone for recharging and data transfer (though recharging is apparently all the cell phone plug does).