PLUG AND PLAY; Many holiday tech buyers are hanging on to their old PCs and directing their dollars toward accessories such as digital cameras and MP3 players.(BUSINESS)

Byline: Steve Alexander; Staff Writer

The hottest personal computer this year might be last year's model. With consumers reluctant to upgrade to ever-faster PCs, this might be the holiday season of the computer accessory.

Similarly, experts foresee slow sales of the new business-oriented tablet PCs that recognize handwriting and sell for $1,700 to $3,300. But buyers will find plenty of lower-priced gadgets that plug into their current PCs, such as digital camcorders, portable hard drives, MP3 players and wireless phone/organizers.

Those accessories are expected to help drive an increase in sales of consumer electronics this season, with the help of some new features on previous years' star sellers such as DVD players and video-game consoles.

Some of the attached gadgets, such as portable hard disk drives, will work fine with old PCs, while others, such as digital camcorders, will be a bit slow because the PCs lack fast FireWire connections.

A FireWire connection speeds data from gadget to PC and back as much as 33 times faster than the more widely used Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection, which is an important plus if you've got an hourlong home movie to transfer.

Some gadgets that use only FireWire connections, such as Apple's iPod MP3 player that holds about 4,000 songs, will force consumers to upgrade their old PCs or buy new ones. Check what kind of PC connecting ports you have before buying accessories.

At the same time, PC makers are trying to tap into the consumers' taste for multimedia by adding consumer electronics functions to computers. New high-end PCs equipped with the Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system will be able to receive and record TV broadcasts on the PC's hard drive in addition to providing standard computing features.

Other firms are trying to get in on the multimedia PC push. Using "virtual speaker" technology from Dolby Laboratories of San Francisco, California-based InterVideo is selling a $50 software product called WinDVD 4, which turns a two-speaker PC into a simulated surround-sound system. The goal is to improve the sound when playing music disks and computer game soundtracks.

There's also been a lot of innovation in digital camcorders, which can help consumers at least pretend they can make and edit their own movies. As a result, consumers are replacing old analog camcorders with new digital ones because the picture quality is about twice as good, said Tom Edwards, an analyst with consumer electronics sales tracking firm NPD Techworld in Port Washington, N.Y. It probably doesn't hurt that some of the new digital camcorders are so small that they fit neatly in one hand and can be carried in a coat pocket.

Instant gratification

But that's only half of the digital camcorder story. The other half is about instant gratification for those who want to share their films or create a director's cut: You can hook your camcorder to your computer and turn your movies into digital computer files, then burn the movies on to a CD or a DVD disk and mail them to Grandma.

Or, using programs such as Sony's Screenblast Movie Studio ($69), you can edit your movies on your PC to reduce three hours of vacation film movies to 10minutes of highlights.

Gadgets that don't plug into your PC might plug into your TV. A new handheld karaoke sing-along machine - Karaoke TV Star, from IVL Technologies ($80) - connects to a TV, which displays song lyrics and plays back the digitally processed tones of your voice.

The karaoke unit uses a digital signal-processing chip to raise or lower the pitch of your voice so it's in tune with the background music, and to add vocal enhancements such as electronic distortion or gender-shifting that turns men with bass voices into soprano divas.

Also available to plug into your TV are videogame consoles from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft have launched online gaming services.

Microsoft's Xbox Live Starter Kit lets you play games online through your TV for $50 a year, plus the cost of buying the game. But because the service is only for gamers who have high-speed Internet connections, Xbox Live delivers higher-quality game play than a dial-up service.

Yet, the broadband requirement can be inconvenient, since many consumers will be forced to drag a TV and the Xbox from the living room to a computer room where the broadband modem is located.

Sony's PlayStation 2 online gaming works for dial-up and high-speed connections, and for the moment remains free once you buy the online-enabled game disk.

For game players not enamored with online play, the gaming industry is offering more "mature rated" games such as "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" for PlayStation 2, a controversial hit that sold 1.4 million copies in its first three days on retail store shelves.

M-rated games are aimed at the growing number of adult game players. In "Vice City" you live out a life typically seen only in the movies: Petty street criminals assault pedestrians, intimidate jurors, commit carjackings and regularly shoot it out with the police.

Going wireless

If all that makes you want to call a congressman, do so with your wireless phone. After all, long-distance is free and the wireless phone companies need customers after a slowdown in sales to traditional customers forced them to reach out to teens and upscale business travelers. As a result, wireless phones are more feature-laden than ever: Some are a pocket organizer, e-mail port, game machine, and music player all wrapped in one.

Teenagers tend to like wireless phones with games, color screens and customizable colored plastic outer shells. Business people might like Sprint's Handspring Treo 300, an e-mail and Web-friendly phone with the Palm handheld organizer operating system. It has a full keyboard so tiny that it fits under the screen.

For business travelers who need more computing power, the Audiovox Thera Pocket PC/Phone from Verizon Wireless is a handheld computer that uses a version of the Windows operating system and is wirelessly linked to the Net. It can run familiar business programs such as Word and Excel while playing streaming music from a Web site.

But while such products are fashionably new, Edwards of NPD says the biggest seller this holiday season will be the now-familiar DVD player. That's hardly news, since DVD players are a well-known consumer electronics success story that have become commodity items, sometimes selling for less than $100.

New technology

What will drive DVD sales, Edwards says, is technology that enhances the recording and playback experience. DVD players are beginning to use technology from personal video recorders (PVRs), such as TiVo, that feature the ability to search for TV programs, automatic recording anytime, and playback functions that simplify skipping ads.

As DVD player sales rise, sales of high-definition digital TVs should increase as consumers seek better TV pictures.

Edwards says he expects consumer electronics sales to increase 3 to 4 percent this holiday season, even though consumers are supposed to be nervous about the economy and PC sales are expected to be flat. The reason: Consumer electronics sales do not tend to dip when the monthly Consumer Confidence Index does.

"Most of consumer electronics sales are based on perceived need," Edwards said. "We need to be entertained."

- Steve Alexander is at alex@startribune.com.

1) Audiovox Thera Pocket PC/Phone, Verizon Wireless, $600

2) HDD 20 GB USB Portable Hard Drive, Iomega, $200

3) Elura MC camcorder, Canon, $1,000

4) Handspring Treo 300, Sprint, $500

5) Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Rockstar Games, $50

6) Xbox Live Starter Kit, Microsoft, $50

7) TravelMate C100 Tablet PC, Acer, $1,870

8) iPod 20 gigabyte MP3 player for Windows, Apple Computer, $500