I didn’t have the time to get over to CeBIT in Hannover this year, but it was well covered by a range of online sources. The show’s daily newspapers weren’t online yet, but coverage from Engadget, Gizmodo and CNET turned up the following interesting items:
ASUS was showing Eee desktop all-in-one slabs (iMac clones) with HDMI and Blu-ray, an EeePC built into a wireless keyboard, and a wireless LCD screen prototype, but the star to my mind is the dual panel touchscreen laptop. This concept was mooted about a year ago by the OLPC group as their second generation design and follows on from the Nintendo DS. One of the screens will act as a full-size keyboard when need be.
A new trend is to bolt a netbox with an Atom chip and HDMI output to the back of an LCD screen to enable browsing etc. by remote control.
Nice PC case from BMW design… lots of pocket projectors… lots of NAS devices stacking drives… the usual robots.
Fraunhofer was showing 3D ping pong hooking the motion detection from last year up to a glasses-free 3D flat screen.
SD cards up to 32Gb, Compact Flash 100Gb, ExpressCard 64Gb. 2.5″ 512Gb SSD from A-Data. 2Tb Western Digital 3.5″ drive. ASUS is showing a laptop with a 1Tb SSD, perhaps the OCZ Z-Drive.
The “BeBook” open format e-reader looks quite good at US$280. Also the Onyx Boox and iRiver Libre. All are going after the Kindle. All have E-Ink screens.
Along with the PC in a keyboard, here is another example of the interface subsuming the computer: a racing steering wheel with a dock for the iPod Touch. Tilting the wheel controls the game on the Touch.
Navigators (eg Garmin nuvi 1200, 1300) are finally catering to mass transit using pedestrians with public transit maps, bus time tables, pedestrian routes.
MSI is showing an SSD module that plugs onto their Windows motherboard giving a desktop an instant-on option for linux providing IM, Skype and browsing without having to boot up Windows.
IBM is showing a USB stick that connects directly over SSL to a bank for transactions.
Developed in Zurich by IBM, this guy opens an SSL connection with the bank’s servers, keeping the data safely on its side of things (this guy has no storage of its own) and displaying the transaction on the hardware itself. Even if your connection is breached by a “man-in-the-middle” attack, the hacker’s funny business will be exposed on the device’s display, which comes equipped with a big red “panic” button — just in case.
