CeBIT Australia – UMPC, cool hardware and …… booth babes??

I attended CeBIT Australia today and enjoyed my time, apart from the fact that I was carrying my laptop around and a few other things with me! I’ll write up some reviews of some hardware devices I saw within the next few days, but I thought I’d give you a quick rundown of what I saw.

I was very impressed to see, and get my hands on, the first Ultra-Mobile PC (previously known as the Origami Project from Microsoft) in the southern hemisphere. This device was quite amazing, and I’ll try and get some more detailed pictures as well as some detailed specs of this device soon. As you can probably tell, my first impressions were good, although Windows did take a while to restart after the sales person accidentally restarted the device.

Some very cool gaming hardware was on display with people representing nVidia and ATI in the graphics field, with some really slick cases and frame rates to be shown off. Running they had the fastest cards from both nVidia and ATI and the graphics looked absoloutely amazing.

This device above just blew me away. It’s a USB key that is as thin as a credit card, water proof, reasonably strong, and has a maximum capacity of 2GB. It’s priced fairly well too, and if you order over 300 you can get them personalised with a business logo, or any design both front and back. I’m not quite sure if I’d have any practical use for it but it sure is cool to see that sort of storage capacity in a device that thin!

This was one of two cool media devices I saw (the other I’ll post up later on). It runs on its own software, supposedly supports most common codecs except for Real Media. I’ll be interested to know if it supports H.264, as it claims to support mpeg 4. The model pictured has some great features built right into the box such as wired and wireless networking and a fairly decent audio output. One problem I had on first impressions was that the interface for the device didn’t seem nearly as polished as the Windows Media Center or FrontRow from Apple. I think it’s got lots of time to keep improving it’s self, and the device alone seems worth the buy.

Now, I have no photos of this yet (I’ll endevour to get some for you) but they may have been banned from E3 but they were out in force today, the booth babes representing two main companies, ATI and Saphire, but there were a few others as well. I know the ATI girls (4 of them wearing tight fitting outfits) got quite a few looks as they walked around the show floor.
I’ll be posting some more news from CeBIT in the next few days, so make sure to keep watching this blog!

-james