A Whirlwind Tour of CeBIT in Hannover Germany (pics)

I was lucky enough to go to CeBIT in Hannover Germany this year, it was my second time there and once again I found myself awed at the size of the CeBITfairgrounds in Hannover. It's extensive, CES Las Vegas is dwarfed in the amount of floorspace, if that means anything to you for a relative size comparison. I'll be posting articles over the next few days featuring specific gadgets from the show, but for now let's take a whirlwind tour for those that stayed at home (and warm).

I say warm, because it snowed, and rained, and freezing rained, and hailed -- well you get the point. The weather in Hannover was *awful*.

But, once I found a leopard skin laptop (the Ego) it quickly became apparent that trekking through the snow was quite worth it.

Panasonic had on display the worlds biggest plasma display, all 103-diagonal inches of it. It was large. I don't know about their slogan "Ideas for life", but the TV was certainly larger than life.

Girls showed up to this party too, tech companies love to feature models to hawk their products, Flybook marched about beautiful girls to promote their Tablet PC / Notebook device. I'm not going to show the pictures of the girls that were only painted and had no clothes on, let's just say the Germans are much less prude than Americans. Now, where's the actual product (Flybook) in this show you ask? Good question...

Much more rated G, they had cute robots that could talk in multiple languages and laugh at a tummy tickle. These NEC built robots, called PaPeRo,really were cute! Their not for sale though, more like a proof of concept for a personal robot assistant from what I understand (see more about PaPeRo here: http://www.incx.nec.co.jp/robot/english/papero2005/index.html)

A stuffed lion, with a soccer ball and Toshiba laptop. Duh!

Note to readers, Germanyis hostingthe World Cup 2006, and boy did they promote it. Every single PC vendor there (no exceptions) had EA Sports FIFA 2006 running on their machines.

Lamborghini. Check. Asus Lamborghini notebook.Check.

More soccer, not technology, just 'cause.

Oh, and a FIFA branded Toshiba laptop. Enough soccer yet?

Pink leather notebooks (this is an Asus with press on pink cover).

Samsung had their new Q1 UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) device out to help Intel promote this new product (view large image)

This is the Sony Ericsson P990 that runs Symbian. There were many other phones. Okay, millions of other phones.

This is a new Samsung Pocket PC phone with WiMAX integrated, they promoted the fact you could drive 120 KM/h and still get good data reception while you're driving. You think I'm kidding right, well here:

(view larger)

Now do you believe me? You can only get this Wi-MAX M8000 Pocket PC Phone in South Korea right now. Next stop, Seoul...

(view large image)

This is the top view of a new UMPC PC from Founder, a Chinese company, they're selling this device in China right now. The rest of the world has to wait 3 months for a UMPC device. Maybe Shanghai and not Seoul should be the next stop.

This was cool, an artist using a touchscreen LCD to draw pictures of show visitors.

The show is 20 years old, so they marched out some old gadgets from 20-years back, this is a Toshiba word processor. Ugh. Thank goodness for now.

I mean seriously, do you think these guys are really checking out the cool notebook?

I like the robots still...

They had some wicked looking PC cases and desktops there, this one from Hiper.

Samsung had a 5MP camera with built-in TV tuner, yes it's TV you can see on that screen, not what the camera is focusing on. No joke, you name it they've put a TV in it -- this show was sick in regards to the amount of "mini TVs" or integrated TV devices. Do we really need to watch TV between taking pictures on a camera? I guess so.

An ultra slim PC from Shuttle that uses a Pentium M processor. Cool.

This is the back of one of those robots. I wonder what the VGA out is for?

A PDA with integrated TV from LG. Just in case you put down your TV integrated camera and need some TV.

GPS integrated devices are way popular in Europe, much more so than the U.S., here's a GPS PDA from Asus that was on display.

Well, it was a long day, and the internet connectivity was awful at the show (hundreds of thousands of people battling to get on wi-fi does *not work*) So, instead of battle for an internet connection I went outside to this here snack bar as the day ended. German sausages anyone? Mmm.