PC Expo Report
Young and all,
I visited PC Expo last Thursday, but I've been
in the woods in the Adirondacks since, which
explains the delay in this report.
First, for my "assignment" from Young. I checked
out Acer's exhibit to see about the AcerBasic. It
wasn't there. I asked one of the Acer reps standing
around, and he directed me to a kiosk with some other
model of Acer desktop PC. Clearly the reps they had
there weren't very knowledgeable about Acer's larger
plans. I saw no Iomega products at all at the Acer
exhibit, in fact. Bandai wasn't there at all, as
I suspected. As a result, Young, I'm afraid it's
a little too early yet to see the Internet-box part
of the Iomega story in the flesh. This doesn't
surprise me, since there's usually a few-month
lag between an announcement like the AcerBasic
news and the actual rollout, especially if their
original target isn't the USA.
The Iomega booth was about three times the size of
the 1995 Iomega booth, and about three times the
size of the Syquest booth. The prototype laptop
Zip was there inside a Toshiba notebook. It's
the size of the standard floppy/HD/battery swap-
out. The rep there didn't have it up and running
yet--the doors had just opened. He said it ran
identically to the IDE/SCSI Zip, though, able to
read both sizes of standard Zip disks and able to
read them fast enough to run a video off them.
Clearly Iomega is selling product like mad. They
had no units, of any models of product, available
for purchase there. Instead, they had racks of
empty boxes for their various products (Ditto,
Zip, Jaz, various SCSI boards, and accessories),
so you could at least read the specs off the boxes.
The niftiest thing there, for my money, was a
demo of how the Jaz can be stacked into an array
and used for audio editing. The demonstrator had
a Pentium PC with six Jaz drives daisy-chained
onto it, and he was using the system to produce
studio-quality edited sound from many, many
independent tracks. The "composition" he was
using at the time we watched was the sound of
an urban street scene, with auto noises, bus
noises, general hubbub, and the like. It was
very impressive. Clearly the Jaz has the
A/V editing market in its hip pocket.
I judged the guy demonstrating this arrangement
to be the most knowledgeable Iomega person
there at the time of my visit, so I pumped him
a bit about things. He was somewhat circumspect,
doubtless more so than usual after the eight-
million-versus-five-million-Zips-for-1996 flap.
Nonetheless, he said that the Jaz drives are now
moving out steadily. I asked him if Gateway 2000
would be announcing soon, and he smiled and
raised his eyebrows.
The one thing I still don't have an answer on
is how tough the Jaz cartridges are. Clearly,
for the audio editing he's been doing, he's had
to handle a lot of them. I asked him if he'd
ever had a failure, and he said no, that he'd
knocked them around quite a bit but not one
had ever lost data on him. Still, the tech
specs on the Jaz brochure Iomega was distributing
indicates that the "disk drop height" is 3 ft.
Clearly, you can't drop one hard on the floor,
or let it be knocked around by baggage handlers,
or FedEx it to a friend, and expect it to be
safe from data loss (though it looks like it's
tough enough to survive normal jostling on one's
desktop and the like). I see this as the only
potentially serious drawback of the product.
Does anyone out there on this thread have any
information on the hardiness of the Jaz in
actual use?
Next, I went to Compaq to check out the LS-120.
They had a couple of machines there with the
drive installed, but they weren't making a big
fuss about it. I went to the PC that had a
little promotion of the LS-120 running on it,
and I interrupted the demo via the handy-dandy
Alt-F4 exit route. :) Then I called up Explorer
and took a look at the contents of the LS-120
drive. It listed the directory faster than it
would have listed a floppy drive, but not by
all that much. About that time, one of the
Compaq demonstrators came over, having noticed
that I was diddling around with their demo. I
told him I was trying to get a fix on the speed
of the drive. We worked out the numbers, and
it comes out at something like 30 MB per minute,
maximum, with the average lower than that. I
tried running an .AVI video file off the LS-120,
and it wouldn't work. (The demo had been running
off the hard drive.) The Compaq guy conceded that
the LS-120 isn't fast enough to do things like
run .AVI files directly off the disk. (The Zip
can do this, at least the SCSI one can.) Still,
I was more impressed with the product than
I thought I would be. The disks are remarkably
tiny, the same outward size as a 1.44 MB floppy,
and from the outside, the drive looks almost
exactly like a floppy (though the specs say that
it weighs a whole pound, which will be a problem
if they try to make a laptop/notebook version).
My guess is that, if the Zip weren't around and
didn't have a huge head start, the LS-120 would
have made it as the floppy replacement. Its
developers must be frustrated in the extreme.
As I said, Syquest's booth was smaller than
Iomega's, and it was focused primarily on
the ezflyer 230MB drive. I don't think it
is any more of a competitor for the Jaz
than the EZ135 has been for the Zip. Since
this thread and others have gone over this
rather endlessly, I'll leave it at that.
There was no contrary evidence, as I saw
it, at PC Expo.
I saw no Syquests or LS-120s anywhere but at the
Syquest or the Compaq booths, respectively. (I
did not visit the 3M booth, where I understand
there was an LS-120 demo.) There were Zips,
though, on various machines at various other
booths. Also, there was the occasional "Iomega
Ready" card prominently displayed. (The most
prominent one I can remember was either at the
McAfee or the Adaptec booth, I can't remember
which.) Finally, there was a discount mail-order
catalog being forced rather aggressively into the
hands of attendees at the main entrance, and it
had a big Zip drive promotion on the cover.
After the show, I visited the downtown Manhattan
COMP-USA several blocks away. They had a few
dozen Zip drives available (various manufacturers
and connections), and they had a good supply of
Zip disks behind glass at the customer service
counter. They also had about a dozen Ditto
drives and two EZ135 drives. I asked about
Jaz drives, and they said that they have been
getting them in, but that they were all out at
the moment, and that being all out was a pretty
common state for them to be in. The clerk and
I laughed together when he said that.
Just thought you'd like to know how it looked
in the Big Apple last Thursday.
Cheers, Tom (long IOMG) |
