The Future on Display

ou look at it every day, take it for granted, assume it will cause you no trouble. It sits on your desk, a window into other worlds. You may spend more time with your monitor than with your family.

In today's workplace, some monitors stay at agencies longer than the workers do. Data suggest that a monitor typically outlasts two computers, says Bob O'Donnell, research director for device technology at International Data Corp., a market research firm in Framingham, Mass.

Monitors are important, and now is the time to sit up and take notice of them. New technologies are now available and the trade-offs between price and performance are stark.

The flashiest advancement is the desktop liquid crystal display (LCD) monitor. Notebooks have long featured LCD monitors. Yet only recently has the viewable area of LCD monitors gotten large enough for them to begin competing with familiar cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors for space on the desktop.

And space on the desktop is exactly why someone would purchase an LCD monitor. They are slim, a fraction of the size of any CRT monitor. They are also flat rather than curved like most CRT monitors available today.

Many agencies cannot justify the extra expense of an LCD monitor. "Other than the cool factor," O'Donnell says, "LCD monitors are a status symbol at this point." That doesn't mean agencies that choose to buy CRT monitors are getting shortchanged. "CRTs are so much cheaper and affordable," O'Donnell says. "Plus, some people feel CRTs have better image quality than LCDs."

CRTs also have a new look. The flat screen CRT is coming into the mainstream market. A flat screen, rather than curved, reduces glare and improves image quality, O'Donnell says. Compaq Computer Corp. has even considered including a flat screen CRT as its default monitor for its new line of Deskpro business workstations.

No matter what type of display you choose, how big should your monitor be? A 17-inch monitor is the standard offering for computer manufacturers like Compaq, Dell Computer Corp. and Gateway Inc. O'Donnell suggests that a 19-inch monitor might be a good trade-off now in price and performance. A 20-inch or 21-inch monitor is too overpowering for most desktops, however, he says.

A Tablet, Cubed

Aqcess Technologies Inc., an Irvine, Calif., company that specializes in mobile computing, recently released the Qbe-pronounced "cube"-Personal Computing Tablet. The portable computer is almost all display coming in at a spacious 13.3 inches.

The company's goal was to design something more portable than a laptop, something users could walk with, says Ray McGoldrick, technical marketing manager for Aqcess.

"You can go into meetings, take notes on the screen and it is quiet," he says.

The Qbe comes in three flavors, the Genus, Cirrus and Altus, each with ascending features. The Qbe includes Intel Corp. processors running at speeds of 400 megahertz and 450 megahertz. It offers hard drives from 6.4 gigabytes to 20 gigabytes. Each of the models comes standard with 96 megabytes of memory and a CD rewritable drive or a DVD-ROM drive.

The Qbe is equipped with a camera for video teleconferencing or taking still shots. And because it is a tablet rather than a notebook, the Qbe has no keyboard. As a workaround, the screen of the Qbe can be converted into a keyboard.

The tablet is equipped with a pen so users can take notes. After programming the tablet to recognize their handwriting, users can convert their scribbles into computer text. It also features voice recognition software.

Intelligent Decisions Inc., a reseller based in Chantilly, Va., is selling the Qbe on its National Institutes of Health Electronic Computer Store II contract.

The Secret Switch

Cybex Computer Products Corp., a Huntsville, Ala., computer security firm, recently introduced a solution aimed at government officials with more than one computer on their desks. The SwitchViewSC is a small switch that enables users to connect multiple computers to a single monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Cybex designed the switch for a government agency that needed to move between classified and unclassified networks, says Sid Falling, Cybex's vice president for application engineering.

But Cybex had to meet certain requirements before the agency was comfortable. No data could be stored in the switch in the move between networks. Thus the SwitchViewSC does not store data sent to it from a keyboard. Also, Cybex had to ensure that the switch could not be exploited as a link between classified and unclassified networks. To do this, Cybex turned off what is known as "cascading," making it impossible for hackers to detect the switch through scanning.