Flaim@CeBIT 2008

 

Thanks to the company I work in I was able to visit the Cebit2008 exhibition in Hannover last week. I’ve been there for three days - that is not really enough to see everything but I have some remarks that I would like to share with in a quick manner :

What I really liked:

• the city - tidy, with outstanding communication - subway,trams,buses - I could get fast everywhere I wanted,
• the fairground (Messe) - really huge and some of the halls were really impressive - especially the huge wooden roof above one of them,
• the germans have ‘ordnung’ (order) everywhere - nothing is a coincidence - they have everything arranged and ready to rock,
• some of the exhibitors had some really nice booths - T-mobile and samsung generally kicked ass,
• new asus laptops (the small ones with leather) - great designs and small sizes,
• the olympus e420 with the 50mm pancake lens - cool product - good that Olympus resurected the Pancake:),
• the samsung quad-hd 50 inch display - well that wasn’t the most reasonable thing out there (imagine that there is no way to record and hold the data of this quality - blu-ray discs are only 25gigs ;)) - but anyways it looked great,
• a big SUN container on a trailer which acted as a liquid-cooled mobile server cool idea and it really worked,
• iF Design exhibition (the hall was always empty:)) where you could see and touch everything listed in the iF Product Design Yearbook 2008,
• IBM booth - everyone could see most of their high tech servers and storage solutions - working and running - and the staff was trained to answer all geek questions - good!

And what I didn’t:

• the weather and german food,
• everything was extremely crowded,
• Samsung didn’t show the cell phones they were yelling about - they didn’t want to confirm them either,
• Sony’s response to iPhone - the Xperia X1 was shown to the public - but it didn’t work - what a shame… the forgot about batteries,
• the design of new Sonyericsson mobiles - awful!
• EEEEEEEEEEE PC - that is so awful - it looks and works worse than most of it’s chinese competitors !!!
• the Asus Lamborghini models and accessories - still look like crap,
• Microsoft and other software companies had really ugly booths,
• Huge amounts of modded cases/computers/laptops - without any style i guess - just some bling-bling with thousands of colors,
• Benchmarks of the new Geforce (which you could see on several booths - like asus) - the 9800gx2 - were disappointing - the card runs only 30% faster than a 8800gtx - a shame - I hope it was a bad dream and they will do something with the drivers…the card inspite of having two chips has only two ramdacs (my guess) so it has only two monitor interfaces (a fact) - instead of four…another disadvantage.
• Intel called their new products ATOM - the name resembles me of the RSS competitor atom… not really a good one - they should stick to Pentium and Core2.

A small conclusion:

Generally the exhibition was fruitful for the companies there - new contacts and new clients for them. … but nothing really new for the public.

Flaim