SITEX 2004

Took a trip down to the SITEX exhibition at Singapore Expo with J after work today. Armed the camera with just a 35/f2, and went in search of interesting stuff to see and snap.

Apple took up a sizeable chunk of floor space as usual, with plenty of gorgeous Powerbooks, iBooks and iMacs on display. Enthusiastic exhibition-goers fiddled with iPods as the Zen Micros in the nearby Creative booth failed to attract the same level of attention.


iPods getting felt-up

Qool QDA-700: Palm-powered PDA Phone
What caught our attention as we walked past the Viewsonic booth:



The Qool QDA-700 seems to be aimed directly at the new Treo 650 from PalmOne. Opting for a minimalist look without the clunky keyboard, the Qool flip-cover phone possesses a swanky 2.8" hi-res colour TFT LCD touchscreen and a 1.3 megapixel built-in camera, and runs on PalmOS v5.4. Tri-band capable and compact, it weighs in at just 139 grams. That's awfully light!

More photos:

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And the rest of the show...
We asked for a demo of Canon's Pixma iP4000 printer. J and I had seen the same series of printers on the shelves in Tokyo's Sofmap stores, and from what we know, this series of printers did very well in the Japanese market, thrashing HP's offerings completely in terms of looks and performance. The demo photo-on-photo-paper print was very good indeed. Black text output still didn't quite match up to HP's, but was fairly decent even then. At S$279, the iP4000 looks like a fantastic photo printer offering.

J managed to pick up a Logitech earpiece for Nokia phones at $10 from the eGames booth, and we fiddled with some Microsoft keyboards for a while before deciding not to get one (she still likes the Apple keyboard).