Computex 2008 -- Gear, gadgets and booth babes

The booth babes are back...

The KingBox booth babes

As are the weirdos...

The Gigabyte, erm, thing

An early theme of this year’s show is overclocking. This is good and bad. Good, in that I don’t give a stuff about it and won’t have to dissect the new products coming to market. Bad, in that Josh Collins of Atomic magazine - who is here with me at the show - does.

Some world famous overclockers, overclock in an overclocking demonstration. From this display I can tell that the key tools required by overclockers are: liquid nitrogen, gaffer tape, kitchen roll

Our first meeting was with Patriot memory, who are wanting to promote themselves more in Australia. While that’s good news for people who like fast memory, of more note was its sponsored gaming clan, PMS. This girl-only group is promoting gaming for girls who feel threatened by guys telling them to go and do the hoovering while delivering headshots in Counter Strike. A chapter has recently started up in Australia.

Here’s Josh getting his arse handed to him by a Chelsea from PMS. (Actually he did rather well, so the editor may have slipped in a picture of me getting owned instead).

We’ll be reporting more on Nangang in the coming days. But after a few meetings we decided to have lunch and found that a small branch of Japan’s diabolical Mos Burger (in Japanese ‘Mos’ cleary means ‘shit’) was the only food outlet for several tens of thousands of visitors.

Computexian’s sum total of lunch choices

After that it was a race back to the middle of town for the big Intel keynote. Here we found that while it only takes 15mins to get to Nangang in a taxi, getting back in can take an hour in traffic. We raced in to find ten million people in a massive auditorium that I hadn’t ever seen on three previous visits. After climbing all the way to the top of it, the show ended. Hoorah. At least we found out the show’s other main theme’s WiMax and Atom mobile processing. There will be more on these over the coming days.

Intel’s keynote was all about WiMax and Atom

Fortunately, Asus – saviours of last year’s Computex – were in the same building (having shunned Nangang) with another showing of innovative and exciting products...

The new U6V, replete with Bamboo wrist rest

A new, fully built gaming PC which will hopefully appear in Australia too

The Wii-like Eee Sticks are great fun for slashing enemies in games

The ZX1 Lamborghini, Windows Mobile 6-based smart phone!

A laptop with a 3D screen. You don’t need glasses to play this. It’s a touch uncomfortable to view, but this demo with Call of Duty 2 was very impressive. However, using two LCD panels means the screen has a very mottled effect. Don’t expect it to hit the market soon