High-Tech Hip: Cool Stuff for the Home
LOU WATERS, CNN ANCHOR: Apparently -- it says right here -- it's hip to be high-tech. And we are told, if you want to have the coolest cubicle at work, you need to get the latest gizmo.</s>NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: We have got to get on it. Some gadgets could also make you pretty popular at home as well. Here's CNN technology correspondent Rick Lockridge.</s>RICK LOCKRIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It is the ultimate desktop status symbol: a $4,000 computer monitor, the Apple Cinema Display. Thinner than your briefcase, it's the first all- digital display, built to work only with the new line of Macintosh G-4 computers.</s>GREG JOSWIAK, APPLE COMPUTER: So there's no conversion from analog. It keeps the signal pure digital all the way from start to finish, which gives you a beautiful picture, beautiful color and beautiful contrast ratio. a 300:1 contrast ratio.</s>LOCKRIDGE: What kind of work would you do with a big letterbox monitor like this one? None, of course. You would spend all your time watching DVDs. If you ever wanted to roar through the streets of Manhattan without taking your life in your hands, or hover over Hawaii in a helicopter without leaving your armchair, Ipix.com is a Web site to watch. Ipix, which pioneered the art of interactive, 360-degree still photography, has now moved into moving pictures. Slow Internet connections can hinder home users, but the company says directors Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard have agreed to use the technology to make movies where each viewer could steer the plot in a different direction. It looks like a portable CD player, but the Nomad Jukebox by Creative Labs is actually a digital music machine. Its six gigabyte hard drive can hold more than 100 hours worth of MP3 music files downloaded from your</s>PC. CHRISTI WILKERSON, CREATIVE LABS: We did have a lot of demand from people saying, you know what, I have a ton of music at home that I have been collecting since I was a kid, some of it was on tape, there is even vinyl, and a lot of CDs, so this is our solution for everyone to carry all of that around with them anywhere they go.</s>LOCKRIDGE: Expect to pay about $500 for the Nomad when it wanders into stores this summer. Rick Lockridge, CNN.