Time for a little round-up from my CeBIT 2006 visit. Even thought the CeBIT 2006 had 6,262 exhibitors, including over 3,300 from abroad and around 450,000 visitors, I did not see anything really ‘new and exiting’. In fact it was a bit of a dissapointment for me. I had expected that there would be more new gadgets and cool new inventions, but as it turned out it was rather dull. Sure, there were enough new and exiting big plasma and HD-TV LCD screens, but that is just evolution, not revolution.
I did see a few kewl things though and I like to share those with you, so read on…
Off course I liked the new Origami device – or as we now know it: the Ultra Mobile PC. I only played with it for a few minutes so I can not say anything definitive on it, but I liked it’s size, I liked the interface (see here and here) and what I think is really cool, is the fact that they integrated digital terrestrial TV, so you can watch TV anywhere anytime (more or less). The really big disapointment: you only get about 3,5 hours out of the device and even less (1,7hrs) when watching a movie (time to whip out the fuel cell!)
So what else did I see? Well, Seiko had a kewl display with their old digital watches, and there I finally saw the Seiko watch made with e-paper/e-ink. Really cool to see it IRL (“in real life”).
Another gadget (besides all the different phones and MP3 players) that I liked to get my hand on, was the FlyBook. I liked it’s size a lot since it was a lot like the Q1. The cool thing is that it has a real keyboard (more or less) but you can also use it as a TabletPC (see this photo and this one). I think this way it is more usefull than an UM-PC (not to mention the chicks in their booth looked better). But as usual it has it drawbacks too: the price! A FlyBook is over $2000 but a UM-PC will be between $700-$1000.
So what else is their to say about CeBIT 2006? Not much I think. Not a lot of new things a lot of things that are just newer versions of older technology. Hopefully CeBIT 2007 offers more exiting things.
Here are a few video impressions I think give a good overview:
Wannahaves WebTV report (Dutch/English)
Microsoft UM PC commercial:
Interesting Mixed Reality interface:
Windows Vista demo:
And last but not least:
The Chicks of CeBIT 2006 (always nice!):