Roundup

As I said this CeBit was a bit of a letdown. Sony did not have big things running with the PS2. Xbox was there, but outside on a separate stand, though what was nice was that you could see and try out some Xbox Live. ATI had only a demo with FireGL cards and the NVIDIA booth had only one interesting demo running. I have heard the GeForce FX running for the first time in my life and I can say it's too noisy.

I had a brief conversation with Sparkle and they seem to be coming with some alternative solutions for the GeForce FX. So not all hope is lost. Club3D was showing off the GeForce FX and ATI 9700 PRO. No 9800s were to be seen anywhere, except on paper or a non-active board. Club3D is coming with a huge arsenal of video cards, based on ATI, SiS and NVIDIA chips. Sparkle seems to work with NVIDIA only and they told me that Sparkle is not the biggest NVIDIA based Vendor.

One surprise was to talk to a Chinese NVIDIA based vendor. The Chinese had about 3-4 stands covering NVIDIA based products, fans, and coolers. I think we will see the amount of Chinese based hardware companies increasing at future shows. We exchanged business cards, so I hope to develop some kind of contact with this Chinese vendor.

Logitech has an interesting line-up for this upcoming year. Ranging from Bluetooth wireless headphones for PC and Mobile phones, a new version of the Momo wheel and much more stuff coming. I left today (14 March) for some snowboarding and I had to buy a new gadget. I wanted to buy the Sony Ericsson P800, but no shop had one for me. So I went for the Logitech pocket digital, to take some annoying shots of my friends this holiday :)

I'm afraid I'm all out of time, I need to get going in order to be on time in France tomorrow. Hopefully Dave has some nice things to add to this coverage, which you all will read before I do....

Related coverage:

• Teamhardware

Dave

Well, my CeBit visit was a very last minute affair, as I was not expecting to go until a few days before the event. As it was, I had left the arrangements so late the only available Hotel’s left had prices in excess for £250 per night! This reduced me to a day trip to the event which, with a flight out, a coach trip to the show, back from the show and flight back home left me with about 7 hours actually at CeBit. I knew this would not really allow me to provide much on the show coverage, but at least I should be able drop in a few business cards with some board vendors and say “Hi” to a number of the people I know.

Not only did I have a very limited time at the show, but also this was my first time in attendance. I’ve only really visited ETCS since running B3D, and I had thought CeBit to be very different, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer scale of the show – have you ever seen a, normally fairly sane, 28 year old man behave like a kid in a candy store? God forbid I ever see Comdex…!

After a few hours wandering around a few booths and walking miles from one hall to the next trying to locate a few of the people I needed to see, I had to take stock and organise my time a little better. In the end I did get a few things achieved, so here are a few details that I picked up from the show...