Going to the Cebit ICT trade fair was a day well spent. Visited the show on a trip organized by Groniningen ICT with ICT people from my part of the country. Hannover is a 4 hour bus ride which flies away with good company. The fair itself is an ocean. The amount Far Eastern producers of blue-tooth headsets is enough to mute every further sense of imagination. The Microsoft developers boot exhibited Visual Studio 2005, but don’t expect a lot of fancy tools on the rest of the show. After all it is a trade fair. When you’re looking for 10.000 custom set top boxes, available within 3 months, it’s the place to be. When you’re just a geek go for the hardware..
Tablet PC
Hosted by the Microsoft boot was the tablet store. They had a line up of a diversity of tablet PC from different brands. The place to compare. The big difference between the tablets is the screen. My Acer is a marvel but is absolutely not usable outside. Some others, especially the almost legendary Motion, literally shine out. At quite diverse places Tablets could be seen in action. Microsoft used them to serve potential MCE customers a game. The fair organization (or its secret service) used them to do something interesting as well. Regularly you would see someone carrying a tablet as if she was selling cigarettes or popcorn. Tapping all the time. I guess it was collecting data in the field but did not dare to ask.
A complete hall was reserved for “displays, flat panels and CRTs”. Gigantic TV screens dominate the hall. Only flat-screens. The same for monitors, the only CRT’s I have seen on the whole fair were stashed on the bottom shelf of a 13 in an aisle easter Asian trade company. Those could even have been mockups, the screen was covered with a sticker. They will build anything over there. What was in the display hall were tablets PC’s. After all a tablet is a display with a PC inside. Some guys from mktec demonstrated tablets with (also) custom bussiness apps amidst the 96” butterflies.
Other PC hardware
There was a lot to see on computer parts and computer modding. Silent PC’s are hot. The variety in fans is overwhelming. Most amusing was a “cooler-something” boot trying to demonstrate the quietness of their fans while the neighbor boot did home theater's with a sound level that would even mask a hairdryer. The best was the modding contest. Voting #10 is for Robert Stoppels, a Dutchman who built the aquarium PC
The Coolest water cooled PC ever
A personal draw of products seen :
As a former entomologist I liked Ants. The boot had a game where you drive a cart with a steering wheel held in air. Tilting the wheel pushes the throttle, twisting steers. Worked. The wheel communicated with the computer using Ants. Ant, “the power of less”, is a system of very small transmitter, receiver or transceiver chips with a claimed power consumption in the order of micro-watt's. Some Ant devices only send, like the steering wheel. Others only read. With a transceiver you communicate bi-directional. Ants are very basic building blocks which communicate with your software over a serial interface. Haven't seen the API, but the specs are in messages per second. Sounds OK, all I have to do now is dream of a James Bond project.
Walked into RetSoft, KISS document management software from Groningen. Serious stuff. They are looking for resellers.
Quite hi-tech was Eleksen.Out of pressure sensitive conducting wire they weave cloths which make a fabric digitizer. The threads pick up where the cloth is tapped and how hard this is done. Ideal for a keyboard. At Fabrickeyboard you can find a diversity of rollable, washable but comfortable (I did try !) keyboards. As it is a woven digitizer and not a set of buttons you can print anything on the cloth and map the area’s on the fabric to specific keys. A prototype at the boot was a tablet bag. It was designed for young children, an age that doesn’t hold a pen yet, using a high variety of keyboards. When they are young a few large keys will do, when they grow older more and smaller keys are needed. Switching keyboard is a matter of changing the digitizers cover. (And updating the driver (settings)) At the Elkensen web site are loads and loads of other ideas what you can do with this stuff. Like it, it literally feels good.
Home
Quite exhausted I returned to the bus. The ride home was great, all tired but content. It was a great day !