This weekend I travelled off to snowy Hannover and attended CeBIT. It's the first time I've been to this "digital solutions for work and life" forum and it is huge. Just walking around completely tired me out, there were so many things to see. Here's a few highlights. I took a few photos but Engadget has completely outdone me, so I'll just link to them.
By far the most impressive stand was O2 , who had a pulsating ceiling of blue tubes and a neat on-stand radio station. People just hung out there because it was cool. Bit boring though.
The most impressive vendor was Samsung. They had a 10 megapixel cameraphone (a bit chunky), lovely laptops, a UMPC system (I don't see this replacing laptops, sorry) and huge screens. All the Xbox360 demo pods used Samsung screens - they were really nice. Samsung really rock this year with good design and good technology.
In general everybody showed off big TV screens. Very big TV screens. I now have TV screen envy.
I was actually looking for a GPS unit for my car and there were new announcements from both Tomtom (the 510, 710, 910 with nice big screens) and Garmin (the c510/530, C550 with large easy-to-use UI). It's just a shame that the units could not pick up any satellites from inside the buildings. I haven't decided which one to get yet, hmm.
I mentioned the new Microsoft Office user interface in a previous entry and I got to see it in real life on a huge screen on the Microsoft stand. Actually looks quite nice in action.
There were also lots of MP3 players, lots of portable video players (including DVB-T and T-DMB) and lots of other things which don't interest me at this time. Did I mention that CeBIT was huge?
But my favourite stand of all was, errr, I wasn't paying attention. It was in the business processes area, and the company had set up a free waffle-onna-stick stand in the corner. Free waffles, mmmm.
