All The Best

By Frank Pellegrini

Just a few Thanksgivings from now, your wall-size, wafer-thin television will be dashing off an e-mail to your oven. With the unavoidable Detroit Lions game just going into overtime and the gang filling up on corn chips, the urgent message is: Keep the turkey from drying out.

Though that scene isn't with us yet, it's feeling eerily close. Standards for room-to-room PC networking and the conversant appliance continue to creep toward the mainstream (and each other). Madison Avenue's trumpets blare for bold (and still overpriced) idiot-box breakthroughs like high-definition television (HDTV) and $15,000 gas-plasma sets that cling to the wall like framed art. Still, 1998 was a year for improvements.

For home-tech consumers, this holiday season provides a rare bounty. Televisions, digital videodisc players and home computers are better, cheaper and less risky purchases than ever before. Camcorders are tinier; cordless phones more powerful. Half-size ovens cook in half the time.

Though technological advances often come with risks, one safe buy is the DVD player. Less than two years into its existence, 1 million units have been sold. Now the format is entering its third generation, with falling prices and added refinements (a muscular midrange unit like the new Toshiba SD-3108, seen here, is $699); 1,700 titles are available, and that number could triple this Christmas season with an infusion of back-catalog classics. Wary of splurging for a collection? In the home-theater market, legitimacy means that Blockbuster--and many local video stores--now have discs to rent. (Some even rent the players.)

For an extra $100, you can try DVD's pay-per-view cousin, called DVX. But don't get too attached yet. "Some of the concepts aren't bad," Kevin Hause, a senior analyst at market researcher IDC, says with faint praise. "In the end, the best thing about it may be that the player will still play DVDs after DVX dies."

HDTV and flat-TV sets have brighter futures, but affordability is years away. And then, of course, in the case of HDTV it will remain a programming desert out there for some time to come.

As long as you're stuck living in the present (and your kids watch too much TV anyway), the gift for 1998 might be a new PC, even two. This year's top models (like the Compaq Presario 5665, seen here) roar--and still seem to have last year's price tags attached. Just as intriguing at the other end of the spectrum, the $499 eTower has arrived. Forrester Research analyst Bruce Kasrel notes that while 43% of America's 100 million homes have at least one PC, only 12% have more than one. Though the maturing U.S. PC market grew just 2.5% last year, a new era may be dawning. "We could finally start to see disposable computing," Kasrel says. "You buy one for the kids, and if they break it, so what?"

Getting those two PCs talking to each other is already possible with RF (infrared) attachments. But analysts are betting that a home network based on connections through your phone lines will be the standard with staying power. HomePNA, a consortium of high-tech companies including Intel and Lucent, hopes to have the technology, called 1 Mbit/s, in stores early next year.

So how long until that wonderfully wired Thanksgiving arrives? Well, your PC is ready. Your appliances should be next. To be really useful, they'll have to be in constant contact with the world. That may take another five years, reckons Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "Homes are really conservative places," he says. "What's needed is a reliable connection to the Internet, and right now only cable lines are promising for that."

Still, some companies want to get you connected sooner--one appliance at a time. In 2001 NCR plans to ship the Microwave Bank, an oven that--seriously--lets you get your e-mail, bank online and watch TV while your dinner's molecules get a workout. Whether it's healthy to do it all as your turkey's getting nuked, you'll just have to wait and see. Welcome to the future.