I visited the Connect 2004 Exhibition at the Chennai Trade Centre,
and here are the highlights - mostly gadget-focussed, I'm not really
interested in the zillion companies selling VB development services.
1. Both AMD and Intel had large booths, and AMD is emphasizing AMD64
(as expected). They trotted out a 2-CPU Celestica Opteron box, but
not a demo model, just a static showpiece.
2. Palm was there through their local distributor. Tungstens and other
hardware were there on display.
3. The Simputer people were there at the rear, with some Simputers on
demo. Too bulky and kludgy, IMO. The build quality was about the same
as 1st-generation Taiwan-made mobiles 15 years ago.
4. AMI had a superb 1U NAS with 4 hot-swap SCSI slots and 2 Gbit Ethernet
interfaces, running embedded Linux. Pricey at Rs.1.80 lakhs without the
drives - but superb engineering. They also had a PCI MegaRAC server
management card.
5. There was an 1U dual-Xeon with an Intel 7210 motherboard and 2 hot-swap
slots. Rs.80k was the base pricing - not too expensive really, but I'd
prefer the dual Opteron 1U.
6. Lots of notebooks - Fujitsu's local distributor had brought a ton of
Pentium M notebooks, and one ultra-small Transmeta Crusoe based Lifebook.
HP brought a pen-pad and some other Pentium M notebooks. However, not a
single AMD64 mobile in sight.
7. HP had a nice USB 2.0 external 8x DVD writer for Rs.11k.
8. Benq had a bunch of stuff including a DLP projector, LCD flat-panel
TVs, etc. In fact, a lot of the booths had flat-panel TVs - looks like
it's the hot meme of the moment.
9. Finally, the creme-de-la-creme: There's a Linksys distributor from
Coimbatore who offers the Linksys WRT54G for Rs.5800! For those who
aren't familiar with the WRT54G, it's a Linux-based broadband/wireless
router that's been extensively hacked/improved by junta. If there's one
thing at the show that I immediately wanted to buy, it was the WRT54G.
I'm dying to put generic 2.4 with FreeSWAN/IPsec on it. It's ideal for
all the community mesh networks that are sprouting up all over the place.
-Siva