The most notable announcement was Sony's yet-to-be-named PDA, which isn't due out in stores until the fall and which won't have nationwide availability until the end of the year.
I was fortunate enough to hold the unit and turn it on, the first journalist to do so according to representatives from Sony.
The unit was lighter and thinner than an ultra-slim Palm Vx. But the color screen on the prototype wasn't very bright. The on-screen interface was the familiar Palm OS-based interface.
Questions on how long the unit would last with a color screen and how much it would cost fell on deaf ears, as the Sony representatives were tightlipped. ZDNet News managed to convince them to allow us to take a photo and compare the size of the unit to a Palm Vx. However, Sony would not allow us to turn the unit on for the photo, saying that the color screen was not production level.
The inside scoop on the Sony PDA is that the current Memory Stick slot will become an expansion slot later in the year. And while developers are excited that the Palm devices -- the Handspring Visor and Sony PDA -- provide three channels of distribution for essentially the same product, only in a different case, they see some limitations in the size of Sony's slot.
OmniSky's president Barak Berkowitz and Justin Schmid, a product manager at Novatel, both said that fitting an antenna into a PDA and providing battery life for the unit would be a challenge.
The Visor platform made some headway it releasing its modules; the most exciting was the OmniSky module; 11 of the 38 are available and the rest should be out by the end of the year.
Other newsmakers were MP3 players, both receivers and portable players, and at the center of the news was S3's Rio product line.
Dell announced with S3 that it would be releasing its Digital Audio Receiver in August.
The unit is based on Rio technology but the face is distinctly Dell. Rio will also be releasing its unit, also, creatively named the Digital Audio Receiver, in the summer.
The Dell deal is all part of Rio's plan to grow the market for its device using other recognisable name brands. Nike is also doing a similar deal with a portable MP3 player. The guts are Rio's but the case is the partner's. The plan has a name too; it's called the Rio Audio Program.
Dell's unit will cost US$199 when you purchase it with a PC and US$249 as an add-on product. Rio's receiver will cost US$249 and with a networking card it will cost US$299.
The other Rio to make some noise was the portable player, the Rio 600, which should face some competition from the Creative Nomad II MG.
The Creative Nomad II MG will be available in early July and will cost US$399. The unit will have a USB connection, rechargeable batteries and folding headphones. It will also resemble the original Nomad in size and style.
The Nomad II MG is going after the high end of the market for users who are looking for a full range of features including an fm tuner and a voice recorder.
Iomega also released a currently nameless MP3 player that uses Clik disks for media. Details have not yet been released.
This attempt to drive Clik popularity will be about as successful as the clickers that Iomega has been giving out at the last couple of Comdex shows; the result will be annoying.
Iomega officials admitted to me years ago that the Clik disks are not very rugged; they can be scratched if you write on them. And the drives add a moving part, the disk, to a device, the MP3 player, whose claim to fame is that it has no moving parts.
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