Asia IT Expo ’09: a minor disappointment

September 26th, 2009

So I went to Asia IT Expo ’09 and I came back…. I can sum up the experience in that one sentence. But I won’t because, it wasn’t that big of disappointment as last year. At least it wasn’t office furniture expo.

Truth be told, it wasn’t any different than Asia IT Expo ’07… it had some hardware, it had some software, it had more software than hardware, it has some brands and it didn’t have some brands. Some part was improved but it didn’t amount to much.

I’ll show you a picture story.


Lenovo’s large booth was high on notebooks and less on desktop. One of it’s flagship AIO multimedia desktop was missing from the action.

Kingston was waste of space as well. If you’re going to spend good money on booth area, might as well put some worthy hardware to display. Only one display of high-end memory and memory cards display were topping out at class-4 SD cards (No-one had class-6 SD cards in the entire expo).

Prime ABGB had quite a big floor area occupied this time, but majority of it was for their thin-client computing products. Note the Stacker 830 used for server. Rest all the displays were connected to this server using thin-clients. Count ‘em if you can. :)

On the other side of large area of Prime ABGB was Mr. Gulbir and other products which burns holes in our pockets and infect us with upgradiatis. Check the loaded Silverstone Raven with water-cooled Quaddy and GTX260 card. There were many Silverstone HTPC cabinets, but I didn’t bother clicking them as HTPCs don’t excite me that much and it was too crowded with guys drooling all over it.

Booth babes were certainly one area where this expo was improved, but still not good enough for photo collection… Maybe, little more improvement next year?

Toshiba’s stand had some relatively decent booth babes, sadly the products weren’t any more exciting. Only the Portege ultra-portable was worth checking out, but it was kept way in the back.

Another shot of Toshiba Booth

Surprisingly Panache has rather good booth compared to other international brands. Panache is Mumbai based company, majorly dealing in small form factor systems like net-tops and embedded systems. I personally had bought ATOM dual core board from them when it was not available anywhere else in Mumbai.

Panache had many small, truly compact net-tops for display. Couple of cases had vesa mount options so one can attach the cabinet behind LCD panel and make truly compact space-saver system.

Another space waster booth. HP while having large area had rather light display of products, consisting mostly of printers only.

LG had quite a big booth with well separated areas for different product categories, although most of it consisted of various types of displays.

This particular model caught our eyes… the LCD panel model, I mean. It was 42″ LCD panel with only 720P HD capability, but the viewing angles were really really good. With connectivity options such as DVI, HDMI, Component and Composite this 42 incher was pretty nice deal at 66k. Although I’m sure there must be some LCD TV panels with more features at this size, the display clarity and viewing angles were seriously good.

ES-ET booth has some promotional discounts going on for Virus-scan software.

Another shot of ES-ET booth.

RSG group (imagine store, Apple authorized resellers) had various Apple products for display. Of all the booths, the representatives were most friendly and fun to interact with.

Anyone wanna rent server systems… Rack-mounts, Dell servers, Mac pros, Sun server, Blades… whatever your flavor is, you can rent it here.

Outside the Asia IT Expo

So all in all, if you had seen Asia IT Expo ’07… this one is not much different. Lack of major brands and exciting products, but slightly improved booth babes.

On the software front, there were quite a few web hosting and email service providers… but most of them didn’t have managed hosting and email management systems. It’s shocking to see that many of these companies still run on manual support systems. One of the company who also provided ad-space and promotional services, didn’t know about managed tracking and stats report generation.

Apart from web hosting and email service companies, there were few software companies who at least had knowledgeable representatives. Few ERP/CRM development companies had well organized booths and well trained people.

I wouldn’t say it was complete waste of time, but those who didn’t visit the expo didn’t miss much. Apart from Prime ABGB, RSG group (Apple), Panache and LG booth we didn’t spend much time at any other booth.

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