So today I woke up early yet again in efforts to actually make it to the expo and meet up with a friend as well as get a good run thru of the expo as a whole. I must say that the expo this year is quite large, so not disappointed with the offerings. Needless to say there's a bajillion booth selling various cases, there are also some good product offerings. So on to talking about some nifty products complete with photos!

Edit: Photos and added! Thumbs are click-for-larger. *See note at end about pics. [1/16/'08 9:05pm]

For a change this year they're using Moscone west as the 2nd hall, the South hall as usual is packed. I'm about on my way out for today as I've got some other things to take care of later today. I have only made my way through the main south hall focusing mainly on other various companies. Now I'm going to try to remember all the finer details of what I saw. I realized I lost a bunch of flyers, but I've got pictures of the important stuff.
So the hot item of course when you walk in at the Apple booth is the MacBook Air. They have a ton of units set out and the whole thing is totally swamped with people demoing it. I still have not actually used one, yet.
Google has a booth and they've got actually quite a crowd. Basically they're just showing off all of the various Google services which interesting enough there is a great deal of people who don't know about everything they can do. I didn't notice if they were talking about Google Docs but that in my opinion is the current big thing for them. (See my previous entry about the podcast– MB Air/Google Docs for on the go)

Rogue Amobea has some new software out, the big one that I was really excited about was Airfoil. Basically you can stream/play out audio AND video from any other computer to another one. So basically if I have a bunch of computers around the house (which I do) I can have them all playing the same audio (or video should I choose) and be fully synchronous! I'm gonna be playing with that as soon as I have some time when I get home.

On the pro media front saw some really nice stuff from CalDigit. Really slick RAID solutions. Interestingly enough there are PCI-express extension cards. So basically you have a card in your tower, and then you connect it to the RAID. What this does is that you basically have a full PCI-X/Express extension of the bus all the way to the controller in the array case. Amazingly fast and super reliable. While the price point starts at $2300 all the way up to $8,000 this is a VERY good unit. Oh and eight grand buys you 6 Terabytes and transfer that at 400MB/s. (Yes, MebaBytes a second.)

Last few items. LaCie has some really, really nice pocket hard drives. Given I'm in the market for one I've been keeping an eye out. Even their largest one is still only a bit larger than your wallet. Their super small ones are barely an inch large. (Pic right) And their rugged units look REALLY nice and the price point is around $1 a gig. I want one of these disks.

Last year the Axiotron Modbook (Pic left) was one of the hottest items. Honestly it was right up there with the iPhone. Other Wold Computing had it at their booth and they were swamped. This year Axiotron has their own BIG booth and lots of demo units. I finally got to play with the realization of a tablet Mac. Many friends have been saying they'd buy one as soon as Apple releases one, and I've always been lukewarm to the idea. Having used one now, I can see why people like these. Even though the Modbook is a hacked product, it'd damn well done and very nice.

So that sums up day one at the expo. I'll be back tomorrow and definitely get a nice walk-thru of the west hall with the other stuff as well. I have more pictures of today, I still haven't decided how I want to post them (gallery here, or Facebook.) Check back soon for the picture dump.