Dick Tracy Never Had It This Good!(Brief Article)

• Author: SALTZMAN, JOE

WHEN I WAS A KID, my friends and I were in awe of a comic strip detective named Dick Tracy who had a miniature two-way radio watch on his wrist that he used to talk to his colleagues. It was all fantasy 50 years ago, but today it seems everyone has a cell phone and a Palm Pilot doing things that Detective Tracy only dreamed about. The idea of a stranger on a train passing information in a split second via the infrared port on her Palm Pilot to another stranger on another train aiming his Palm Pilot at hers is proof enough we're living in the early 21st century.

Other dreams have become startling reality. Lugging around many pounds of 78 rpm records that housed Richard Wagner's "Ring," one swooned at the idea of carrying all of that music in the palm of one's hand. Now, that is possible with CDs. Watching movies at the local cinema, one barely could imagine what it would be like to have copies of cherished films and play them at home in a miniature theater. Now, DVD and HDTV make all of this possible.

The idea of a video phone has been with us for decades, but now, with the computer and digital cameras, we can send live pictures to relatives and friends, and the old photo album is an electronic smorgasbord. The electronic equivalent of the oversized leather address book and appointment calendar now fits in a pocket. Portable TVs, MP3 players, and the old favorite boom box reconfigured in smaller yet louder packages let us take entertainment anywhere we want to be.

One company that always offered watches that did a lot more than tell time, Casio, offers a wrist audio player, which holds 16 megabytes of music (about half an hour at CD-level sound quality) that connects to your PC through a USB port so you can transfer music files from your hard drive. Another one of its products is called PCUnite, a personal-digital assistant watch that holds addresses, phone numbers, and appointments. It can swap data with your PC or Palm Pilot through its infrared port. Or there's a Wrist Cam watch that not only tells time, but is a digital camera that stores about 100 pictures in its memory banks. And the Global Positioning System watch tells you exactly where you are via satellite and tracks you as you move about. If you punch in where you want to go, the watch will tell you how to get there and how long it will take you. If your kids ask, "When will we get there?," you can give them an answer within a moment.

The real question is: How do all of these...