Geek's dream

Post-Gazette reported The $3 billion Emirates Palace hotel is probably the most expensive ever built.... The unique aspects of the Emirates Palace are hidden inside its ductwork: nearly a thousand miles of blue, red and green fiber-optic and broadcast cable, and enough other advancements to have convinced the staff that this is the world's most high-tech hotel. They may even be right.

The government-owned hotel, which has a separate floor reserved for Gulf Arab royalty, boasts an unbroken bubble of wireless Internet access on its 250-acre grounds. It works next to the two swimming pools, even on the private beach. Guest rooms are larded with so many techie amenities that the seven remote controls required to operate them have been distilled into a portable touch-screen panel. Hotel employees whisk themselves on two-wheeled Segway scooters to the physical plant, more than a half-mile away, where the hotel's massive air conditioners, emergency generators and underground reservoir of fresh water for the gardens are kept, leaving the hotel basking in silence.

Guests in the hotel's 394 bedrooms, where nightly rates range from $600 to $12,000, get a handheld computer to interact with the television, stereo and 30 separate lights in each room. The $2,500 Linux-based AMX handheld, with an 8-inch color screen, can also arrange a wake-up call, download a movie, record a TV show or call for maid service.

"You can lie in bed and adjust everything," said Rumyanka Tzolova, Kempinski's marketing manager. "You don't have to move. You don't have to pick up the phone." The hotel's 17-person technology department designed the interface, which is complex enough to require a butler to tutor guests in its use.

And I thought it was hightech when I stayed at a hotel that offerred a broadband internet connection.