COMPUTEX IS ONE of the big three trade shows every year and this year Computex is celebrating its 30th anniversary and along with it comes a new, up to date logo among many other things. TAITRA, or the Taiwan External Trade Development Council, held its annual pre-Computex press conference today and it is expecting a much better show this year than last year.
Computex 2009 wasn’t what’d you’d call a soaring success, although the show still did better than expected considering the general market downturn at the time. This year TAITRA is aiming higher, although there’s some help coming from China, both in terms of exhibitors and buyers. We should see the largest show so far with 1,750 exhibitors, although this is only an increase of about 50 or so from last year. However, there are more booth space available, where a booth is considered a three by three meter square and a single company can have multiple booths and as such there will be no less than 4,700 booths this year.
The two big things that are expected to be shown off this year are of course tablet PC’s and e-book readers. It’s expected that all the major laptop and mobile device makers will be showing off some form of tablet device at Computex, but the question is if the market is big enough for so many players fighting for what is a very immature market with so far a very low demand for a product that hasn’t really found its niche.
We should also be seeing a huge influx in 11 to 13-inch low power CPU notebooks, especially as the notebook market isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Although we did see some smartbook products last year, we should be seeing more products using open platform operating systems such as Google’s Android this year. TAITRA is keen on pointing out that open platforms such as Google’s Android are key for Taiwanese manufacturers to be able to bring competitive devices into the market.
Touchscreens of all kinds are another feature that we should be seeing, though some of those might be held back until Display Taiwan 2010 kicks off four days after Computex ends. However, there’s no doubt we’ll see many more touchscreen enabled notebooks and netbooks this year. What seems to be missing is a killer application to take advantage of touchscreens, but hopefully this is something we’ll also see at this year’s show.
On a final note, as you might’ve noticed, TAITRA has updated the Computex logo for the 30th anniversary with what is said to depict a door to eternity. To go with the new logo is also the face of a laughing child made up out of a cityscape of Taipei, various electronics, as well as birds and flowers, which is said to represent the benefits that technology can bring to all of us.
SemiAccurate will be reporting directly from Computex 2010 which starts on the first of June, although we should hopefully have some sneak previews for you ahead of the show.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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