Passage Four Some products respond to consumers’ needs; others, like Sony’s airboard, seek to create them. Like sending e-mails from the pool, or curling up in bed with your favorite sitcom. This futuristic apparatus combines the functions of a television, a DVD player and the Internet into a portable tablet the size of a place mat. If it catches on, it could change the concept of being digital at home. At 1.5 kg, the airboard is light enough to carry anywhere in the house, and can send and receive data wirelessly from a base station hooked up to home-entertainment equipment. A 10.4-inc. (26-cm) LCD screen delivers vivid moving images or can serve as a digital photo album, and a touch-panel display eliminates the need for a keyboard. Sony, which began selling the device in Japan late last year, praises it as the Walkman of the information age. “It is amazing,” says company president Kunitake Ando, who loftily describes the de- vice as a gateway connecting the home to the outside world and eventually linking all appliances within. “ The wireless environment will become quite common pretty soon.” I tried out the airboard in my Tokyo apartment, and I have to admit: it’s way cool. First of all, airboarding is easy. I didn’t crack the instruction manual once to get the thing set up—and this is from someone who has trouble finding the “record” button on the VCR. Relaxing on my balcony, I could call up the airboard’s on-screen remote control and start playing video. By pressing another button, I could Net surf or check my e-mail account, while a split screen let me simultaneously watch my movie. The airboard’s base station—the size of a shoe box—doubles as a stand and battery charger. There is a slot for inserting a Sony memory stick, the gum-stick-sized cassette used to store photos and other digital files. But the airboard is not for everybody. At $1,065 , it costs as much as a laptop but isn’t meant for serious computing. Checking e-mail is easy, but a 56-kbps modem makes for pretty slow surfing. The touch panel is fine for sending quick messages, but pushing the on-screen buttons is tedious for anything longer.