FIGURE C

The C-Pen can scan a line of text.

You run it over a line of printed text like a highlighter, and it takes thousands of little pictures, basically scanning in the text. It then translates the pictures back into text, which you can edit on the C-Pen's small screen. Alternatively, you can use the device's infrared port to beam the scanned text into a Palm device. Basically, it's good for picking up interesting quotes out of magazines and newspapers or grabbing some information from a business card, etc.

Firepad
The next booth to catch my attention belonged to a company called Firepad, at http://www.firepad.com. They were giving demonstrations of their FireViewer product. FireViewer allows you to display large, scrollable images on a Palm device. It can be used to view pictures, maps, or diagrams, in grayscale and in color, depending on the type of device.

They then did something quite remarkable. The marketing representative explained that they had a camera aimed at one of their employees back at the office. The live image came streaming over a modem attached to their Palm IIIc, and the video image appeared right on the handheld device. To prove the image truly was live, the representative had his partner call the woman sitting at her desk in Mountain View, California.

"What do you want her to do?" he asked the assembled crowd. When no one else immediately responded, I held up my hand in the unmistakable Vulcan salute and offered, "How about this?" The Firepad representative told her what to do, and sure enough, I had a woman clear on the other side of the country tell me to live long and prosper right from the screen of a Palm IIIc.

PocketPyro and BikeBrain
There were a few other intriguing bits of hardware I'm anxious to see more of in the future. There was a cool looking gadget called PocketPyro that attaches to the bottom of a Palm device to give the platform "unprecedented access to multimedia power and storage capacity." Take a look at it in Figure D.

FIGURE D

PocketPyro connects to the Palm device to add multimedia power. Click picture for a larger image.

At the moment, it's basically an MP3 player, but in the near future, according to their press release, it should offer speech recognition, file storage, voice recording, and text-to-speech functionality. That's a tall order they're asking from the multimedia engine inside, named with utmost modesty, DragonThunder.

There was also an interesting device called BikeBrain that lets you attach your Palm device to the handlebars of a bicycle. It provides graphical displays, route directions, logging, and smart features such as automatic wheel size calibration. It's pictured in Figure E. More information is available at http://www.bikebrain.com.

FIGURE E

BikeBrain simply oozes with hip attitude. Click picture for a larger image.

Chapura and AnyDay.com
I dropped by Chapura (at http://www.chapura.com) where they were handing out really cool pens that have nothing to do with their products: two bits of software called PocketMirror and PocketJournal. They work together to "mobilize the complete suite of functions available in Microsoft Outlook."