Different exhibition halls had different themes, such as broadband communications, flat-screen display technology, or home/personal electronic products. The exhibits in the different halls varied from fairly sombre displays, for example of small switches and other components exhibited by Taiwanese manufacturers, to some over-the-top multimedia presentations which in the case of Hitachi featured some quite impressive live musicians and dancers. I was told that had I visited the exhibition several years ago I would have seen many more such extravagant displays, but companies are now cutting back on expenditure due to the recession. Even so, many exhibitors had hired "companion girls" - through agencies, apparently - to wear stunning outfits, hand out freebies and beckon people to see exhibits. I've been to many large exhibitions in the UK but had never seen anything like this before.
There was a lot of picture taking going on, almost exclusively with digital cameras. Some attendees just seemed to be photographing the girls, but others were busy taking close-up shots of new products. I noticed this particularly at the Sony stand, where there were two very smart prototypes of personal flat-screen display products on show, but also at many other stands.
Quite a few new products caught my eye, including a neat web/payphone station from a company I'd never heard of and can't now recall, and a very nice handheld eBook from Toshiba that was hinged in the middle and had two LCD screens so that the reader could view two pages at once like a real book. There was also a very nice next-generation whiteboard from Pioneer, that looked exactly like a whiteboard except that it had an inbuilt GUI display which the demonstrator interacted with using what looked to me like ordinary whiteboard pens. It was linked to a PC of course. I was also impressed by another manufacturer's electro-luminescent flexible plastic strip with static coloured images that were switched on and off cyclicly. It looked very attractive, although I'm not quite sure what potential applications it has. I didn't look to see who the manufacturer was. Several manufacturers were displaying Bluetooth products - devices such as prototype handheld wireless video players that decoded and displayed (rather jumpy) MPEG-4 video.
I think the thing that impressed me most of all were the eInk prototypes [ss/»] that Philips had on their stand. There were four small screens on show - the largest perhaps five inches square - and they looked completely different to LCD screens. The colour prototype had rather muted colours, but the monochrome display looked for all the world like cellophane-covered white paper with very smooth inkjet-like black printed text. It really did look much clearer and easier to read, from any angle, than an LCD - and given that it is (supposedly) thinner and lighter and has lower power consumption, I feel certain that it will start to appear in handheld products within a few years.
Here's a report of Sharp's activities that I came across a few weeks later while browsing Sharp's website... [»].
