Computex: the biggest winners and losers

Now that the frenzied craziness that is Computex Taipei is done and dusted for another year, we can all take a step back and take a look at some of this year’s winners and losers.

Winner: The Consumer
Consumer electronics and devices galore took centre stage in the halls of Computex Taipei this year, with even typically B2B firms taking a decidedly more consumer facing stance. Consumers, it would appear, are actually pretty good at dictating what they actually want to buy, a fact the industry only seems to have woken up to. Still, better late than never, and hopefully this is one win that won’t have disappeared come Computex 2011.
Winner: The Taiwanese economy
The recession dealt a hard blow not only to the world as a whole, but also to Taiwan in particular last year as the little island nation of manufacturers felt the pain of economic squeeze. This year, however, things were different, with Taiwan’s External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) – one of the two organizers of the show – noting a 15% increase in value over last year.
TAITRA is estimating that Computex 2010 attracted 35,000 buyers from 216 countries/areas and 120,000 visitors with total sales transaction for the six day show running to about US$23 billion, most of which will find its way into the pockets of Taiwan-based enterprises.

As if that wasn’t win-worthy enough, TAITRA is also patting itself on the back for arranging some 2,014 business talks in just the first couple of days, which resulted in sales deals worth US$230 million in total. Overall, over 5,000 products were showcased at the event.
Tentative Winner: E-Readers
It seemed like every company and its mother was releasing some sort of e-reader at Computex this year. Indeed, the event even had its own e-reader pavilion, jammed chock full of the devices, all e-readers great and small, in color, in black and white, with 3G and without.
Visitors were bombarded with e-reader propaganda proclaiming how green the devices were and how they would save the rainforest from impending doom.

BenQ, Vishay, STMicroelectronics, Ralink Technology, Nationalize Technologies, Freescale and others all joined the e-reader pride parade, waxing lyrical about the device’s prospects as new figures emerged predicting that the market for e-readers in the US alone would reach 6.8 million this year.
Content providers like Amazon, we were told, were even mulling a telco style subsidization model, to shift more e-readers for very low cost with a monthly book subscription.
China also emerged as a potential e-book worm, with analysts expecting one million e-books set to fly off Chinese shelves this year alone, just for starters.
“E-readers will kill the tablet” proclaimed an optimistic representative from Delta, which was showing off the biggest ever color e-reader. Ironically, however, the industry is thanking Apple’s iPad for the surge in interest in paperless reading, but the players in the e-reader space know full-well that the line between catalyst and competitor is a thin one indeed.  Therefore, while e-readers did win the week at this year’s Computex, it remains to be seen whether the devices will live happily ever after.
Winner: Tablets
Tablets being a win at this year’s Computex seems like a no-brainer, with some of the press even dubbing the show Tabletex. If a firm didn’t have a tablet offering to tout at this year’s show, then it was quickly disregarded and relegated to obscurity.
Windows tablets, Android tablets, Meego tablets… Computex had them all, from copycat iPad rip-offs to really quite innovative and interesting offerings.
Freescale – which launched its new ARM Cortex-A8 based i.MX535 processor at the show – told RCR it really saw a big market for tablets in all form factors and spanning several usuage models, but the firm also reminded us that the tablet would be a device for content consumption rather than for content creation, which is good news for notebook makers who may have worried the tablet phenomenon would take a chunk out of its business.

Not everyone is convinced though. Some analysts told RCR they believed tablets would only score big with a very small niche of early adopters, and that people would be reluctant to splash out so much cash for a device they would have to carry in addition to their smartphones and laptops.
Winner: SSDs

Yes, yes, we know that SSDs have been predicted for take-off for several years now, but it really does seem as if 2010 is the year when the hard drive relinquishes its crown. Much of this, of course, is thanks to the tablet phenomenon and an increasing push by consumers for ever more mobile platforms.
Kingston, ADATA, Transcend, OCZ, PNY, MTRON, G.Skill and Sandisk were just some of the firms showing off their solid state wares in Ole Taipei. Sandisk even had a whopping 256GB drive on offer.
Prices are still too high, but performance and capacity are increasing to the point where frankly, if you don’t have an SSD in your mobile system, you might end up being considered a bit of a loser.
Winner: ARM architecture and now…software?

Oh to be ARM at this year’s Computex, smugly sitting back and enjoying the show as literally thousands of devices tipped up sporting the little British firm’s processor designs.
With tablets in ascendance, low power chips are very much in demand, and ARM’s roadmap doesn’t look to be trailing off any time soon. Indeed, a slide presented by ARM president Tudor Brown on day one of the show caused much excitement when sharp eyed reporters noticed a new addition to ARM’s processor family, the Eagle, coming up soon.

Hardware wasn’t the only thing ARM was peddling at this year’s show, however, with the firm also leading the charge for an independent not-for-profit Linux company called Linaro. Backed by Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments, ARM said the new firm would put its efforts behind various Linux projects and that Linaro would be releasing new software every six months.
Winner: Qualcomm

Qualcomm, much like China itself, is sometimes referred to as a sleeping giant: a firm so huge, yet seemingly much lower key than its brash and boastful competitor, Intel. But at this year’s Computex, the sleeping giant appears not only to be stirring, but marching forward with force, showing off an impressive 140 Snapdragon processor based devices.
The tour de force by Qualcomm includes products that have either already launched or are currently in design and run the gamut from smartphones to pocket tablets, and smartbooks in a variety of form factors.
Just some of the noteworthy mentions in Qualcomm’s impressive line-up are Acer’s Liquid and neoTouch smartphones, Dell’s Streak five inch Android tablets, HP’s Compaq Airlife 100 smartbook, HTC’s Droid Incredible and Google’s Nexus One smartphone. There is also a Huawei S7 tablet and Lenovo’s LePhone smartphone.
Qualcomm  also announced its first dual core offerings at this year’s show, unveiling its MSM8×60 series of Qualcomm chips; two 1.2GHz Snapdragon CPUs – the fastest ARM part on the market – and a GPU capable of both 2D and 3D acceleration for up to 1080p of video encode/decode. The series also includes a built in GPS a dedicated low power audio engine and support for 24-bit WXGA 1280×800-pixel resolution displays.
As if that wasn’t enough to awe the crowds, Qualcomm was also wowing punters with a whole host of Gobi-equipped devices, eZone wireless technology and MediaFLO.
Winner: Wireless keyboards
With tablets all the rage, and with people raging against virtual keyboards, a new and growing market in physical wireless keyboards was seen emerging at Computex this year.

A multitude of companies were showing off keyboards large and small which could be used – in some cases – to type on up to six devices simultaneously.
Bluetooth technology was the big enabler here, and it certainly seems feasible that users will be happy to carry around a lightweight keyboard to facilitate typing on a small MID. Win!
Winner and Loser: Intel

While Intel did manage to successfully pull off a shock and awe keynote, unveiling hundreds of tablets, netbooks and devices running on its little Atom chip, there was still some skepticism over whether the chip giant had what it takes to take over the tablet and mobile market.
True, Intel has a plethora of partners, many of whom came out at Computex waving both an Atom and Meego flag, but behind the scenes, many vendors are still hedging their bets with both ARM and Intel offerings. It remains to be seen whether Intel can pull off its Computex feat on retail shelves.

Winner and Loser: MSI
Without a doubt, the most talked about tablets at this year’s show came from Taiwanese firm MSI, which announced both an Atom based and ARM based version of virtually the same tablet (see: hedging bets, above).
The two 10-inch tablets – Wind Pad 100 and 110 respectively – caused rather a stir on day zero of the show. The Wind Pad 100 is powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor and comes with Windows 7, whilst the Wind Pad 110 is powered by the Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset and comes with Android.
Already, however, it seems the Atom powered Windows tablet is drawing some negative reviews, with many describing it as “sluggish” and overpriced (at $500 compared to the $400 for its ARM based competitor).
Winner and Loser: Asus
As to be expected from the king of computer hardware, Taiwanese firm ASUS did not disappoint in the tablet department, pulling a whole range of products from its hat. However, some felt that at a whopping 12 inches, Asus’ flagship tablet may have been a little on the large size, and certainly was not quite as mobile as an ultra-mobile platform should be.
Meego: Could be a winner, then again, maybe not
We’ve never really given Meego much credence as an operating system, despite being backed by both Nokia and Intel. At MWC it was considered something of a bad joke, and one was hard pressed to find any developer willing to spend time on it. At Computex, however, things looked decidedly different, as Meego gained some important allies – although whether or not this was simply lip service remains to be seen.
Linux-based MeeGo mobile platform made a strong showing in Taipei and a much needed endorsement from Novell which says it plans to release its own SUSE MeeGo operating system. Novell, which also has significant clout, said it was already working closely with several OEMs and expected to see SUSE MeeGo ship preinstalled on devices over the next year.
Meanwhile, it seems that many of the original Moblin backers are still committed to MeeGo as well as other Linux software sellers. For instance, Linpus – the firm behind the custom Fedora-based OS for the Acer Aspire One – said it too planned to deliver a MeeGo version of its Linpus Lite netbook platform, as did Mandriva and instant-on Linux vendor DeviceVM.
Intel was obviously showing off various Meego based tablets, but so were its partners, Asus and Acer. Acer didn’t offer an expected launch date, but Asus did, saying it had Meego offerings in the pipeline scheduled to hit shelves in 2011.

Carriers too were pledging allegiance to the Meego flag, with Spanish telco Telefonica, Telecom Italia and Orange coming out in support.
So, Meego looks like it may be gaining some momentum, but after a very slow start and lackluster beginnings, does it really matter if it eventually does cross the finish line, or will all interested parties in the OS race have packed up and gone home by then?
Fail: Netbooks
Not much to say here except, 2008 called, it wants its form factor back.
Fail: NVIDIA
NVIDIA showed itself to be all talk and no trousers at this year’s event, pitching a huge tent (literally) but failing to deliver any real Tegra 2 products. Instead, the firm patronizingly urged “patience”, as if we haven’t had quite enough of that over the past six months.
So many times in the past year we’ve heard NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang proclaiming that 2010 is the year of the tablet, but the firm failed to get on the bandwagon on time, missing out on delivering announcements at arguably the year’s most important tablet show.
If Tegra 2 products fail to show up right sharpish, we believe the firm may find itself with very big worries indeed.