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Technology Stocks : Zenith - One and Only -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scott Lerner who wrote (4135)	1/21/1998 5:47:00 PM
From: flickerful	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6570

from computer life online i would love to cut & paste zenith into these things... Everything electronic is converging these days. We look at it all, and try to answer the question: Is "smart TV" an oxymoron? By Sean Kelly "Once you get past the hype, you'll quickly spot problems." Someone's trying to move into your living room -- and it's not your loser brother from out of town. Big companies like Intel and Sony are busting their brains to come up with the best ways to infiltrate your entertainment experience with their PC/TV convergence technology. Compaq, Gateway 2000, and Thomson Consumer Electronics are leading the pack, making even five thousand bucks seem reasonable when you figure you're eliminating the need to buy a separate PC and television. But once you get past the hype, you'll quickly spot problems: It may be great to surf the Net during commercials or play Quake from the couch, but there are plenty of things you won't want, too. For starters, it's a pain to read more than a couple of lines of text off a screen from that far away. And writing e-mail or paying bills from that distance is even worse. A PC home-entertainment system can't replace a desktop or laptop that lets you work and play. So far, no one has solved this 2-foot/10-foot problem. Since we're sick of waiting, we've developed a solution ourselves: a home- entertainment center built around a laptop. Imagine: Laptop and entertainment-system makers working together to standardize how we plug our PCs into docking stations -- where serial and parallel ports, phone jacks, monitor/TV/stereo and peripheral ports, satellite connections, and so on all reside in standard positions. In your living room, you can enjoy all the benefits of a computer-based entertainment system, but when you need to get some work done, you can remove the portable unit and take it on the road or stick it into another docking station in a different room. The station in your office, for example, would connect to printers, telephones, and other productivity peripherals instead of joysticks and gamepads. The best part: When your laptop isn't plugged into the living room setup, your entertainment gear works like it's supposed to, unaffected by the PC's absence. When you do snap the computer in, you add the intelligence factor to your digital TV, surround-sound stereo, DVD player, and the rest of your goodies. To put our money where our mouth is, and to see how such a system really would work, we headed into our labs and assembled it ourselves. The result isn't cheap, but that's not the point. We wanted to prove that a simple solution to the 2-foot/10-foot problem exists -- and we hope system manufacturers take the bait and figure out how to make it affordable. So read along as Associate Technical Editor William O'Neal gets under the hood and creates the ultimate home-entertainment system -- from scratch -- then compares his creation with the convergence systems currently on the market. Also, check out what sound and vision experts Rudy Trubitt and Gregg Keizer have to say about issues to keep in mind when building (or buying) your own intelligent entertainment center. zdnet.com