Today's blogpost is going to be about some of the products that I ran into on Computex 2010. It'll contain some of what I found really cool and possibly useful to me and also some notes about what seems to be the really big things this year. Read on if you want to know which new kinds of cool gadgets you can expect to see in the stores and advertisements in the coming time.
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I'll start out with something that I bought and will bring back home to Denmark. These devices are all digital microscopes. You can see them on their Chinese/English website vitiny.com. It's got enough English to be navigated, but is almost entirely in Chinese. Anyway, I'm not trying to sell you stuff. (Otherwise I'd refer you to my own webshop, hah. But sadly I don't have any such.)
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I just bought one of the products, which is the black USB microscope on display here. All of them use a small camera with some sort of tiny macro lens to see things really close-up. Some of them have built-in batteries and can be used without a computer, but I'm fine with using my laptop together with the machine, so I picked the cheap one. It was really cheap: 1800 NT$ (~60US$). Now you're thinking "so it's some cheap little plastic scrap from China with such lousy image quality that no-one would think of using it for anything serious? I was actually thinking it might just turn out like that, but I took the chance and the image quality was quite good (1600*1200) and it can magnify up to 320x. They market it as being usable for webcamera too, but I don't really see the point. It's good at focusing at close-up stuff. The one I bought came bundled with software that can capture snapshot and video. If schools take this thing seriously, it could be a convenience in experiments in biology and particularly the reports students have to write. Microscopes are dirt expensive and I'm sure schools could use this to cut down the budget a bit if they were to exchange a few of their conventional microscopes with these.
If I were to be a distributor, I would go and try see if I could sell some of these to Danish schools and bookstores.
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The people there in the booth were really nice. Weren't like some store clerks that just try to sell anything to you. After all, they mostly look for distributors. It was one of the few booths there that didn't mind doing direct selling, though.
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Next up is a company galled Gajah, selling eReaders (those are really hot this year. No doubt about it, you'll see these things all over bookstores and electronics & digital entertainment dealers soon.) When I look at that company name, I can't help but think "Ganja".
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Picture is not so good. Unfortunately they only had lights from below. It was a great booth-design though.
So this is essentially just like any other eReader. I didn't get that much information on it, not really knowing what to ask for, so I don't know what distinguishes it from other eReaders. There was quite a lot of people there at the booth, but one woman managed to come over and hand me a free bag. Smart girl: I was walking all over the place with a bag and their gadget on it the rest of the day. Nice marketing.
They were actually selling the machine at 140 US$ on-site. I decided to wait a while and see if I could find a cheaper one or some other brand I liked more but ended up heading to Nangang, not returning to the booth. Actually that was a really good deal, now I regret having turned it down.
About eReaders: I didn't know much about them before I went to Computex. Actually I was a bit dismissive of them, not really seeing the point in not just using a laptop or tablet pc and assuming that it would be hard on the eyes to read from eReaders like it is for computers.
But looking at them and having one in my hand I was a bit surprised. The screen feels natural, almost like a page of paper, and they don't have backing-lights, thus using much less power than a pc. I could go read a few books off of these in the future with no problems. Especially when it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg. Heck, it might even be more environmentally friendly than real books.
But I don't think they will stop me from buying the real thing once in a while. I still plan on building an epic bookshelf in the future.
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Translators are fairly common around here and so, this is not some new or revolutionary product that's going to change the world as we know it in the new future. I like it, though, and I hope I can go buy it before I venture back to Denmark. They didn't sell it on-site, unfortunately, but the booth staff were nice and showed me a lot of things the machine could do. I'm now certain that this gadget will help me learn more Chinese if I buy it. I'll need to contact them or search their website for location to buy it soon, though.
This translator is slightly different from the mainstream models in Taiwan as it has more features for helping non-Chinese speakers. This way, it is not just focused on translating from Chinese to other languages, but also can be easily operated by people who can't read Chinese, so that it can be used both ways by both Chinese and non-Chinese speakers.
Wanna see more? Here's Global Views website. It doesn't have a lot of information on where to buy stuff as I'd liked, though.
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Next up is the company Brinno.
They sell special kinds of cameras that can do time-lapse or are triggered by movement.
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The product I was mostly interested in was the time-lapse camera they showed. They didn't sell any in the booth, (or maybe they were sold out, I don't remember,) but the products were really cool. Not something revolutionary, but still something that can make it a whole deal easier to be a little creative. I talked with a guy there for a long time (although not the one holding the camera here). Now I really want to have that thing. Wah. I don't usually want to buy so much stuff, but everything here is so cool and yet still affordable. The camera would take pictures in 1.3 megapixels every 5 seconds, 1 hour or any interval you like and combine them into a movie file of sorts. All you do is just stick a USB key in it and it will save to that. You use simple AA batteries and it can run for up to 6 months he told me. Batteries are probably going to last a bit shorter if you set it to take photos more often than every 24 hours I guess, but it's still a long time for camera. Not something you can do with your puny point-and-shoot camera or even DSLR unless it's a real killer machine. (I don't guess there's any DSLR out there that can sleep in between automatic picture taking?)
Here's a link to the time-lapse camera at Brinno's website.
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Then there's these. Sorry for not bringing up anything big and crazy like new iPhones or worlds strongest graphics cards just yet, but I found this small booth in a corner that was marketing LCD touch-screens that can be used pretty much everywhere.
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All of the screens were playing a short movie telling something similar to this poster. On the movie, a person wearing gloves would cut, burn and pour strange stuff onto the screens and then show a completely unharmed device afterwards. They are also more easy to read in direct sunlight because they have a special filter on them.
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They also had a model which could heat itself up, should it happen to be in a very cold place. LCD screens don't work if the temperature is not right, so you can't just play stuff on them when they're frozen.
It's quite obvious these screens are not so much targeted to the general public, but aims more at professional applications such as in laboratories, factories, exploration in cold areas or use on marine equipment.
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Although I stated clearly that I'm probably not ever going to be in need of this kind of product, the people in the booth were still very nice, asking me to take a look and would talk with me a bit about this kind of stuff. I guess they didn't have to work that hard on finding professional contacts during this last day of the show where most of the visitors were normal Taipei-dwellers and many stores were open for retail.
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One thing that caught my eye was the USB 3.0 devices all around. This particular booth was advertising a lot of different memory products selling mainly DDR2 and DDR3 SDRAM for gamers, netbooks, industrial computers and such. There was A LOT of RAM cards around the exhibition, especially in the Nangang halls. There were other booths dedicated to USB 3.0, which is a fairly new technology with specifications released in May last year and products coming up in the beginning of 2010. I coudln't get much decent photos of these however, with a lot of ruckus always going on around them. Actually, people were just generally crazy about USB sticks on this exhibition. I can't see why. It's such a mundane thing. But 500 megabytes/second (4800 Mbit/s) is quite nice. I'm looking forward to having one of those keys when their price drops a little.
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One cool-looking machine I saw when I visited Hall 1 on the second last day, Friday, was this graphics-monster. I was thinking it looked like some sort of futuristic car-motor. My friend Teis corrected me, saying that's most definitely the insides of a tie-fighter.
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What's actually on display here is a bunch of ATI graphics cards fitted together with one of GIGABYTE's motherboards especially designed for overclocking gamers.
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Another place in the same booth, they had put this one together, called GIGABYTE X58A-UD9 HD5870 SOC 4WAY CFX, at this time the current top-scorer in the 3DMark05 graphics test, however right as I'm writing this, is the ASUS Rampage III Extreme. I believe those two have been having a bit of a race recently. Wait a while and they might swap places again. Regardless, it's a killer machine up there and it's absolutely pointless to use it for anything but overclocking fun anyway. (It's a marketing trick anyway. Heck, it has 4 graphics cards for Christs sake. But the cards it uses are great and probably will be available to mortal people after a while. Radeon HD 5870.
Anyway, I wrote a lot already. I have more cool stuff to cover and I still didn't prepare you enough for the future in electronics yet I think. Check back later for more nerdy stuff.