Section A: Japanese Companies

We trudged all the way to hall two to check out the Toshiba Gigabeat Series (especially the S) and all we get to hear is: “Oh, we aren’t going to be releasing this product in Europe, so we are not displaying it here.”

Okay Toshiba – what is wrong with you guys? The Gigabeat S has a load of potential and it is one of the few modern 1.8’’ DAPs on the market at the moment. It’s like they don’t want to make any money or something.


NEC did exactly the same thing. Their first and latest DAP, the VoTol, is also not on display at CeBIT. This is pretty lame, because we would love to have checked it out.

Section B: Generic DAPs

Instead we were bombarded with generic DAP badness from random small Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese companies. You know something is not right when there is a booth from company X that are only displaying plastic mock-ups. When you ask if they have any working models they just answer with “No”. Nothing like: “No, but our stuff will rock!” - Just a plain and simple “No”. Why do these guys even bother coming to trade fairs?



Section C: Companies that are supposed to be at CeBIT but are not

Weirdly enough Archos feels that they are way too important for a petty trade fair like the CeBIT. Or they are way too poor. Boo Archos - minus 100 respect points for you.

Sigmatel also has a booth shared booth, uh well, sort of shared booth, but they were not actually there when we visited them on Saturday. They somehow managed to hop in with the US Department of Commerce. They *should* be back on Monday or Tuesday so we will try and check them out then to see how their latest chipset with Rio technology (STMP 3600) is going.