IT

2007 IT Month Show in Taipei: People, Products, and Pi-zzaz!

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It’s NOT Computex, there’s no John Chow… and there are no freebies for you guys! (This time!…)

Today was the last day for the 2007 IT Month Show in Taipei, and I went along to see what was going on, to do a little ‘bargain’ shopping and get some snaps of some cool devices… Unfortunately, most of Taipei City and Taipei County (combined population approx 6,000,000 inhabitants) also decided to go, too.

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As you can see from outside, and inside!

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It was difficult to get any pictures of the stall presentations because there were too many basketball playing supertall visitors! Mmm… Still, this is the Transcend stall, and free pens were being given away! I didn’t catch any: it was too difficult with a camera in one hand, and a cup of coffee in the other!

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Aha! The HTC stall, with lots of pricy but ultra cool models… They really do give Apple a run for their money, and they’re available NOW! So… why wait!?

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The HTC stall had some really *cool* phones, including the TYTN II, the Touch, and I got to try one!

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Can you spot this model? Of course, this one is MY hand… But the glare obliterates the lovely screen.

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Slipping over to Lenovo, I thought I’d entered a car exhibition, as their F1 car was on show…! No mere pc simulations here…!

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Vroom!… And onto the other Hall 3… where the Asus Eee PC had their very OWN stall separate from the ASUS stall! And it was crowded… but not as crowded as the primary stall… Wow! Still, there’s a large amount of interest in the ASUS Eee PC, and I found out that the black models are now available, as are 8GB models, and pricing is good…

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I think this model is the 8GB model, but I didn’t get a chance to try it! I tried the 4GB and noted that the keyboard quality on the model seemed much better than the first models I tried a month or so ago! Of course, the Eee PC 8GB was on sale but there were no more in stock. ASUS were taking back orders only for that!

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It has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal flash memory and runs on the same 900MHz Intel Celeron chip. Battery power is rated at 3.5 hours, as well. So it’s quite a respectable device. Matched with a portable 2.5″ hard disk with 120GB of space, this would make an acceptable device ‘for the road.’

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This picture was taken from the Sony Cybershot T2 trucks, I managed to get the pink truck, but there were three or four different colors of trucks all selling the range of Cybershot cameras… Cute trucks, nice cameras!

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And so I thought I’d end today’s trip to the World Trade Center’s IT Month 2007 with a picture taken in neighboring 101 shopping mall. The Mercedes C Class… with a rather unique paint job. (Anyone know why shopping malls and exhibitions like to display CARS…?)

19″, 22″ or 24″: how big is your LCD monitor?

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After yesterday’s super long post, I’m going to keep things much shorter and sweeter today. … There are actually two major computer shows in Taipei every year. The first one, everyone knows is Computex. But the second one is IT Month, and last year it attracted over 750,000 visitors as it toured the island. That’s not bad going.

Christine, a friend and I went to 101 to a nice restaurant for lunch on Sunday. And I fell in love… with a 24″ Apple display in the Apple Store in “New York New York Department Store“. I’m not particularly fond of fruit, really. Mostly, they tend to be rather expensive here, and you can get a LOT more PC for the SAME price. But there are times when a large-size monitor will really do things: on that monitor, I could open my blog page on one side, and another page on the other side.

And truthfully, there are times when working away on such a size would really help: like updating my blog theme. It’s pretty difficult to keep flicking back and forth between screens to make sure that you have copied all the elements and javascripts from the old theme to the new one. Trust me, it’s painful. In fact, if you look closely, apart from the sidebar, there are still some elements missing.

Could a large monitor help? Well, yes it could! But there’s a snag: I’m looking at 22″ monitors and I’m finding most of them support 1680*1050 which is a resolution my graphics card does NOT support… Whoa! In fact, my card seems to go all the way upto 2048, but 1680 is not one of them… Woops! Little did I know.

So I can choose: a 20″ monitor (which is still pretty big), two 19″ monitors (one for each of my systems at home), or a 24″ monitor… Which would you choose? Do you have any suggestions on other solutions? I’d like to hear what you have to say.

What is your current monitor choice? I’m using a 15″ LCD 1024*768 monitor from about 5 or 6 years ago at home, a Philips 17″ LCD monitor that is two years old (and plenty big!) at work…