The CeBIT technology trade show opened this week in Hanover, Germany, running until the 16th.
Keeping up with what’s going on isn’t too difficult.
There’s CeBIT News, the show’s official daily newspaper. Gizmodo is a good place to frequently check on new gadgets, mostly mobile devices. They are blogging commentaries from the show. Plenty of ongoing media reporting.
There’s a great pre-show summary from eWeek on some of the product announcements expected at the show. Some highlights (see the eWeek story for additional show commentary):
- Three new DVD recorders from Hitachi with up to 250GB capacity and circuitry that can recognize (and skip) commercials.
- From Intel, “the world’s smallest PC,” designed to fit into a car radio slot, able to function as your car’s navigation, communication, entertainment and switching center
- NEC is bringing the first HD-DVD drive, with capacities of up to 60GB, and a prototype of “the world’s first PC drive for playing back HD-DVDs, DVDs and CDs.”
- Panasonic will show what it says is the world’s largest mass-produced plasma display (about 65-inches diagonally) and a compact digital camcorder with 30x optical zoom. Sharp will have an LCD TV of similar size, which Sharp says is the world’s biggest LCD television, along with its BD-HD100, the first Blu-ray disc recorder with hard drive and DVD.
- In the headset arena, Plantronics’s new CS60-USB is, according to Plantronics, the world’s first wireless USB headset; the DECT technology has a roaming range of up to 300 feet from the user’s computer, and the rechargeable battery should be good for up to nine hours of talk time. Siemens says it’s got the first VOIP cordless DECT telephone; using Skype software, it supports several of the latest Siemens Gigaset cordless phones, and you can even listen to Internet radio using it.
- A wireless mobile hard drive, with battery, from Data Storage Institute.
- A combo VOIP phone and USB flash drive (64MB-4GB) from Inter-Active Media Pte. Ltd.
- The PCMCIA (trade association for PC cards) has a new tech standard “designed to be faster and cheaper than its predecessors,” intended as a replacement for CardBus, to become the preferred solution for users of add-ins.
- Burn DVDs at 16x-two hours of video written in six minutes-with Must Tech Co’s new 16x DVD+/-R.
- Watch (and record) broadcast TV on your notebook, using the TV-DVB USB stick, an external TV tuner from Avermedia Technologies
