First Looks at TechXNY
by flung
6/26/2002
WhiningDog.NET

Ah.. just a few years ago, we had a bunch of different technology conferences and exhibits going on in New York City. However as the economy stumbled the last few years so have the conference attendees. Gone are all the dot coms (well most of them) and gone are even some of the major players in the industry. It's weird not seeing a large Compaq section but that HP section sure looked big this year! It's gotten to the point where now we have one major expo in place of a number of smaller conferences. The big draw to the TechXNY however is still for the PCExpo portion of this conference. Sure you have a DV conference and a Web Services conference going on but I personally wanted to see what the latest things coming out onto the market. Let me first say that this year's conference definitely felt better attended than last year. But with that said, there wasn't anything at the conference that "wow'd" me to the point where I said I had to get it when it came out. There were a few things that stood out for me and I'll highlight them here today. I'll be heading back to TechXNY during the next few days so hopefully I'll be able to follow up with some more pictures and highlights from the exhibit hall. If you want to know more about the actual conference speakers and the news coming out of this conference, well then I invite you to read news.com.

I spent most of the day checking out some of the smaller company booths and concentrated on looking out for case companies, motherboard manufacturers, and anything cool. So with that said, here are my first few highlights of this day.

The first booth I honestly spent time at was the Lian Li booth. There I saw some nice new towers which were not due out till the end of the summer here in the states. Apparently they are already on sale in Taiwan (at least according to the person I spoke with). These 2 new cases have a really nice blue light along each side of the front face which you can't really see well in my pictures. They are ATX cases with a nice case mod on the side with the usual window look. On the front of the case (and also hard to see in the pics) are 2 small LED panels that indicate the internal temps of the case. Pretty sweet! Here are the pics for the cases

New Lian-Li PC 6xxx cases	Another angle
Case 1	Case 2

Then I looked over and saw a number of other Lian Li aluminum cases which were already out.. But I thought it would be nice to show them here anyhow.

The microATX case but it's definitely larger than a Shuttle or a gBOX	Some other mini towers.

I also got a chance to see that desktop style case from Lian Li that some PC enthusiasts think would make a good HTPC case. It's a pretty solid case and definitely a lot like the CoolerMaster ATC-600 case (more on that in a bit!).

Desktop or HTPC case

Walking around for a bit afterwards, I saw the usual host of vendors and then lo and behold, I saw CoolerMaster. Actually there were a number of people walking around with CoolerMaster bags but darn it - I couldn't find one for myself. In any case, CoolerMaster had a number of new cases on display but the ones that took my attention were the new ones based off of the ATC-600 design. These are mods to the existing line and should be introduced in a few months. There were 2 major design modifications to the ATC-600. Both did not have the clear window in the front but rather had doors covering the drive bays. One model had one large hinged door covering the front while the second model had 2 sets of hinged doors (which I believe is called the ATC-610). In any case, here are some of the snapshots

CoolerMaster Towers	and more towers
New ATC 6xx series case	What I think is known as the ATC-610-slightly different modification

ATC-610 front

Motherboard manufacturers were just not around at the conference this time around but Asus made a small appearance via a US distributor. The only thing that caught my eye was a concept PC design that was targeted as a barebones solution. It had a P4 motherboard with practically everything onboard including PCMCIA slots! All you need is a processor, hard drive, and memory and your all set. Unfortunately the PR person I spoke with wasn't sure if Asus was going to create these since they were not sure if there was going to be a viable market. If you like it - speak up and let it be known that Asus should make these bad boys!

View from the side.. I just couldn't stop this guy from touching the front panel. Reminds me of a thin iPaq PC from Compaq er.. HP	Front view	Front lower view - notice the ports!

So I walked over to the Intel booth to chat up with old Intel buddies whom I have no relations whatsoever. It's funny going up to an Intel employee and saying that you used to work for Intel. They look at you with a slight look of betrayal on their faces. A few years ago, some actually congratulated me for leaving to a dot com. My how things have changed now huh? Ok I digress. In any event, I basically spent my entire time at the Intel booth checking out the Mira prototype device. It was a device that basically used an XScale processor and a 802.11 wireless interface running Windows CE.NET. With Mira installed, you easily connected to any remote desktop you have privileges for. Ahh so Mira is your basic dummy terminal modified for tablets.. This would be a cool product if it wasn't for the fact that these tablets would more than likely run you into excess of $1000. Heck, that ProGear deal over at SonicBlue is awesome compared to this. But I have hope for these Mira devices if only a small hope. Flat Panel screens really need to come down in price in order for this to be affordable for the mass market in my opinion. Well here's the one pic I got of the device. The pictures a bit dark but if you look closely you can see the Mira interface which lists the machines you can remote connect to.

Prototype Intel Mira tablet

I did manage to check out a Fujitsu Web Tablet as part of the new Tablet PC initiative. It was definitely a pretty sweet looking device running a Pentium III-M processor. The tablet was definitely stockier than the Mira devices but I didn't get a chance to take a picture nor sample them. I'll hope to have more on other Intel developments later this week. So now I walked over to Viewsonic and checked out some of their tablet PCs. Here are their Windows CE based devices. Basically the AirPanel 100 used Windows CE.NET while the ViewPad 100(not shown) used Windows CE. Both ran on a Intel StrongARM 206 MHz processor and that was the extent of the excitement there. I took a picture of the ViewPad 1000 which is the bigger cousin running Windows XP Pro.

AirPanel 100	ViewPad 1000

And finally for you HTPC users, Listman UnitedHome (yeah I know.. who?) had a pretty cool piece of software that was catered for the HTPC audience. Basically it was labeled as an Internet based home management system. It manages your home's lighting (via devices like X10), thermostats, security, TV and stereo components as well as video cameras etc. It also works as a audio jukebox for your TV. Unfortunately they did not have a video jukebox system and nor can they scan for audio on a home LAN. Essentially this piece of s/w is catered for the mom and pop audience who are not quite computer literate (then would they even have a HTPC, one wonders?) In any event, I managed to get the software which is normally packaged with OEMs supposedly. I didn't find it on the website yet so hopefully I'll be able to provide more info on it. Here's a picture of the UI.

Listman UnitedHome Software

So that's it for now. I will head back and get more pictures for you guys but in the meantime, I hope this was somewhat helpful to what was happening over at TechXNY. See ya! If you have any questions, feel free to email me at flung@whiningdog.net or chat about it in our forums here

Update - Some new TechXNY products on day 2