And a phone, wireless or otherwise, is no longer just a phone. In June 1998, the first generation of Internet-enabled phones arrived in the U.S. market. It allows Web surfing, e-mail access and faxing, and includes a speaker phone. Cidco Inc. has a conventional phone with a screen from which users can check e-mail and surf the Web without ever booting up their personal computers. Motorola, Mitsubishi Electric, Samsung and Qualcomm have similar products.
Digital technology makes even the most pedestrian devices work more conveniently.
Home entertainment will also continue to benefit from emerging technology. Compact discs, which revolutionized recording in the 1980s with their ultra-clear sound, will soon give way to the DVD, essentially a higher capacity CD that can hold about 10 times as many digital bits. Music producers will be able to create much longer recordings at today's quality, or somewhat longer recordings that are of better quality because more discrete pieces of sound are contained on a disk. Sega of America, formerly the market leader but currently outsold by Sony and Nintendo, has prototypes for a new machine code-named Dreamcast, set to debut in the United States this fall. Its expected capabilities include a computer CD-ROM drive designed for high speed.