Pre-Computex

We dropped by Hall 1 to collect our press badges, only to find that they were not yet done. Went down to see if we can spot anything interesting or new. Security was ultra-lax which was great but there was nothing much to see. In fact, the place looked like it was far from done with hordes of people still working on setting up the booths.

Although Computex officially starts on June 3rd, NVIDIA held a pre-Computex launch of their new Tegra system-on-a-chip for ultra-portable devices at Bando. You can catch the full details in our NVIDIA Tegra report.

After the event, we headed back to the exhibition halls to see what we could glean before the big day. Kind of a sneak peek. At first, it looked like the big players were hiding their jewels for the night. We only spotted stuff like these new USB flash drives.

For those who like cute stuff...

New designs for those into leather

Then we came by the Microsoft booth. Two Microsoft booth babes were practicing their presentations for the next day, so I took the opportunity to take some shots of them.

The Microsoft team was busy arranging their displays. It looked like their emphasis this time will be on ultra-portables running everything from Windows Vista to Windows CE. Here were some of the ultra-portables on display.

The silver-black HP Mini-Note 2133 looked especially nice. It has a 8.9" display with a resolution of 1024 x 768 and it actually runs on Windows Vista using a 1.6 GHz VIA C7-M processor and 2 GB of DDR2 memory. Even with a large 160 GB hard drive, it only weighs 1.27 kg. Impressive! The small keyboard may be a problem though... I have stubby fingers.