It is big, very black, and the sexiest thing I have ever seen on four casters. And it has one feature that may actually sell a few: it is completely silent. "It" is the Totally No Noise TNN 500A personal computer from Zalman Tech in Seoul, South Korea, and it is silent because it has no fans. It's all done with pipes and heatsinks (see the pictures here) and I want one. Desperately.
Another product that prompted a more affordable attack of technolust was the Digitalway MPIOHS100, which looks a lot like one of those keychain-style USB pocket drives, only fatter. In fact, it works the same way: you just plug this pocketable $200 (about £120) gadget into your personal computer and it provides a quick and handy way of moving files about. The difference is that the Digitalway - the name of the Korean company that makes it - holds not a meagre 256 megabytes of files, but 1.6 gigabytes. Of course, you cannot get so much storage for so little money with Flash memory chips: Digitalway's little secret is that it has a tiny US-made hard disk inside.
My third pick from Comdex 2003 is the sort of thing James Bond's M would have liked, although, in use, it makes you feel much more like one of the Men In Black. Pretec, a little Taiwanese company, describes it as "the world's first 3-in-1 pen-shaped digital camera". The DP-353 iPen looks like a pen, and you can write with it. You can also switch from a ball point to a stylus and use it on the screen of your Palm or PocketPC. But hold it up and you can take VGA (640 x 480 pixel) pictures with it, storing up to 100 snaps in the 8 megabytes of built-in memory.
The show floor at this year's Comdex sported dozens of similarly novel gadgets, including at least three USB watches with integral storage, lots of little cameras, internet phones, MP3 players, portable keyboards, and a printer designed for mobile phones. In the absence of Japanese giants such as Sharp and Sony, most were shown by small companies from Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which seem to be hotbeds of innovation at the moment.
Finding these nifty little gadgets has been one of the joys of Comdex for at least 20 years. However, the organisers at MediaLive International tell us it is not what the show is about. "This is year one of the new Comdex," says Robert Priest-Heck, president and chief executive. "We've made the changes needed to meet the needs of companies today."
The problem is that Comdex has been in rapid decline. Only three years ago, more than 200,000 visitors flocked to Sin City to see the latest and greatest offerings in the IT world. This year, the show is expected to be about a quarter of that size. There is nothing like as much to see, and not as many people coming to see it.
However, Priest-Heck argues that IT is now a $916bn market, and 90% of IT spending comes from the business-to-business sector. "The industry needs an annual gathering," he says. "Comdex is that gathering."
The sort of thing he has in mind is the announcement that Sun Microsystems' boss, Scott McNealy, made during his Comdex keynote on Monday: that next year, Sun would start to sell enterprise servers based on 64-bit AMD Opteron chips. And the announcement that Siebel Systems' boss, Tom Siebel, made on the same stage on Tuesday: that he was going to spend millions of dollars promoting a customer relationship marketing system, CRM OnDemand.
But you did not have to travel to Las Vegas to hear about those, and being on the spot was not a big deal. Am I really going to tell my grandchildren (if I get any) that I was there when Scott made the big AMD chip announcement? I think not.
Being able to run your fingers over the heatpipes and cooling fins of a TNN 500A is probably not going to thrill the descendents either, of course, but it had a dimension you cannot possibly get just from reading about it.
