SITEX 2009 was as usual, just in time for the holiday shopping. I planned to visit the show on opening day during the mid-afternoon as my schedule did not permit my usual early jaunt to the show. I didn’t know what to expect for I’ve rarely ever visited the exhibition at that hour. I got a rude shock when I arrived in my car to extra long queues to the parking areas and even in the non-parking areas along the side streets. Time to turn around and head back home…mission failed.

Thursday night had a mission brief and plan with my wife. Go for lunch at Changi Airport Terminal 3 and eat at Popeye’s and then zip back out to Singapore Expo for Sitex. I was not about to wait idling in my car to get into the parking area only to troll along row after row to locate that empty lot that everyone else is also trying to snare. Cut the long story short…mission 2 failed. Luckily it wasn’t a wasted trip out east as I’m almost extreme west. My first time eating at Popeye’s in Singapore. Thumbs up!

Third time lucky, I showed up at the back parking area (Xilin Ave) to find myself car number 6 in the lot. Picked out a nice shady spot as the sun was blazing even at 10:20am in the morning.

I walked towards the hall entrances only to be greated by a wall of people waiting to go into a hall. But wait, the doors are opening at 10:30am and I almost got caught up in the frenzy wanting to rush in as well only to notice it was for the John Little Mega Expo sale. John Little sells household items sort of like a Walmart but a little more up market.

Moving along I found myself at the tail end of a long queue which was a bit strange as from past experience no one queues to get into the halls. Odd for Singaporean behaviour to queue to enter. I soon found out the queue was a special queue for customers interested in Starhub mobile, broadband and tv products and services.

Soon I found myself at the ATM machines and was surprised that there wasn’t a long queue. Recall one of my points to going to these shows…withdraw any cash you think you’ll need before even hitting the show venue. The ATM machines are sure to run out of cash real quick.

Countdown to 11am for Sitex 2009 show doors to open but without warning and a couple minutes early the doors open and there was a mad rush of people.

My first stop of was to an ASUS booth to get the low down on two models, the Asus 1101HA and the Asus UL20a. These two were picked out because they both feature the higher resolution display of 1366 x 768 versus the 1024 x 600 of the smaller 10-inch screen Netbooks. I eventually went with the UL20a because it featured Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition. Some will argue why go with the SU2300 Celeron processor at 1.2GHz. Well, I figured even though it is a Celeron, meaning it was crippled with a smaller cache size, it still featured dual-cores and an 800MHz FSB (Front Side Bus) versus the 533 or 667MHz FSB of the Netbooks. The UL20a can also take an additional stick of RAM.

 

 

 

Browse time

Most of the reporting you’ll read about shows is pretty much the same from show to show. Take pics of the booths, catch some pics of the hardware on display and even throw in a pic of a promoter or booth babe. If you’ve followed my other exhibition excursion you know I like to do things slightly different. I get down to the ground and pound the show floor looking for unusual things.

My first unusual sighting was the abKey Premium Next Generation Keyboard. At first I thought it was just another regular ergonomic keyboard until I looked at the key layout. It wasn’t a QWERTY keyboard nor was it a DVORAK layout. I did sit down and try for about 5 minutes. I can say it is possible to learn pretty quick. As this is a Singaporean company I wish them all the best in making some progress and headway in the market place.

 

 

I found myself at a booth selling magazine subscriptions for boy racers. The booth also housed a three screen racing simulator chair. Not as fancy as the one that featured at Lenovo’s booth at one of the previous shows. Never the less, these things are always interesting to see.

 

 

A really neat way to organise your wiring and plugs comes from Eubiq. It is pretty interesting because it is user configurable. Instead of always being stuck with a pre-made set of sockets you can buy and plug-in the sockets. As Singapore uses both the two pin round ungrounded type as well as the big triple pin square shaped plugs this system would work well by using a combination of socket types. I feel I’m going to go for this product in the not too distant future when I move house.

 

 

What is big yellow equipped with three wheels and flies? No it isn’t Big Bird on a tricycle. It is the awesome looking trike from Can-Am, the Spyder RS Roadster. I’m not sure what Class license you need to be able to ride this but seeing as I am Class 2B, 2A, 2, and 3 qualified I don’t think I’d have a problem. Now I only need to get someone to ask me to do a user review. I would be so there. I really miss my old ride a 1991-92 Kawasaki Ninja ZZR-600 / ZX-6.

 

 

The desire to be connected and computing on the go has started up the market for MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) and even the handphone market has started to move closer to a full computer experience. The problem with the full computing experience is the battery life. The bigger you get the more juice it is going to need. The longer run times means bigger battery loads and then that sort of negates the portability. Anyway, it was nice to see someone bringing in two devices that I did actually hear. I don’t think they’ll be adopted so much by consumers because of the cost. They’ll be niche product that a organisation adopts because of their need – perhaps something like a portable client device for Custom’s and Immigration.

 

 

 

What do you do when you have no external storage? Stack it on the show floor. You thought I was talking about external hard drives huh.   Take a look at this stack of Toshiba LCD TVs.

 

 

I mentioned earlier that battery run time is always a detractor for ubiquitous computing and I have this problem with my mobile phone. I just keep running out of juice. There are just too many tweets, updates, and requirements for powering the 3.5G radio, GPS, and bigger and brighter displays. So, it was of interest to me to see Energizer promoting external battery packs for people on the road running out of power.

 

 

With the popularity of Netbooks and the overcrowding of Wireless@SG connections users are all going towards a mobile broadband plan. For this they usually need a 3.5G modem. If you sign a contract some of the telcos will give you a device whilst others may rent or loan it to you while you are contractual obligated. If you don’t want a contract and just wish to buy a modem you can look out for ProLink. I don’t know the price or features. Personally, I’m just using a separate mobile phone for my data connection and that can be tethered by cable.

 

 

A lot of users are now looking at ways to store all the information, photos, videos, etcetera that they are accumulating. In the simplest form – external hard disk drive. But users are getting more tech savvy and the product manufacturers are doing more marketing. Everyone is now hearing about NAS (Networked Attached Storage) but before cheap open sourced equipped boxes came to market people had to contend with using a Server or dedicate a client machine with shared resources. Microsoft has been touting a home friendly Server for a while now but it just hasn’t caught on here in Asia. Well, I was excited to see Acer enter the market with their Windows Home Server box. It is about the size of two McDonald’s Happy Meal boxes and you just hook it into your network and connect to it using a browser to manage it. It has good expansion (storage) capacity and is fairly inexpensive. I remember when I paid over a thousand dollars just for my Windows Small Business Server O/S and that didn’t include any hardware.

 

 

So, there you have it. My visit to Sitex 2009 and the things that caught my attention as well as the one item I purchased. With that I leave you with the last stand. It is an interesting looking notebook stand, the Logitech Alto Connect. It has a power connection and a 4-port usb hub. I don’t know about the performance or connectivity. I just thought it looked cool and just by design it should help in cooling your notebook without needing a fan.