World's largest ICT showcase

1. The Festo "Tron-X" robot mimics the gestures of a fair-goer; 2. A mannequin is fitted with a prototype of a "mental typewriter", which is an EEG Cap that processes electric impulses from the brain into commands for a computer; 3. Doctor Erich Schneider of the university clinic of Munich presents an eye-controlled video camera to be used for surgery; and 4. A Samsung UMPC model presented at the CeBIT '06

Microsoft and Intel unveiled Origami: a new concept of an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) running Windows Tablet (later Vista) and enhanced Microsoft Touch Pack (a suite of apps and utilities meant to optimize using Windows by touch, and not necessarily only by stylus).

Microsoft is aiming UMPCs based on Tablet with Touch Pack at the general consumer. Throughout CeBIT, several hardware manufacturers like Asus and Samsung released different models of these UMPCs, showing details like how user interfaces would work and hardware specifications. The concept has received lukewarm response so far as it doesn't offer anything "worthwhile" and would probably come with high price tag.

BenQ, Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and many other companies unveiled their brand new phones with increased memory capacity, processing power, more features, better cameras, and most importantly, with more stylish looks.

Many companies also introduced Cellphones with TV tuners and relatively bigger screens, hoping that these would attract Football fans who'd like to watch the upcoming World Cup from wherever they want and not miss anything. But it didn't work. There were too many different mobile TV-transmission formats and they were incompatible with each other, resulting in too much confusion. Bitter competition and poor service just pushed back mobile TV. Instead, fans opted for fixed TVs and companies making LCD TVs reported increased sales.

Samsung's SCH-B600, a cameraphone with a 10 megapixel resolution, caught a lot of attention at CeBIT and throughout the web for obvious reasons: its high resolution images even surpass most mid-range Digital SLR cameras. The B600 has a 3x optical zoom, flash, S-DMB support, Bluetooth, EV-DO, TV-out, and will surely carry a price tag to make most tech-lovers weep. Samsung also released another smartphone with a whooping 8 gigabytes of memory.

Another new working concept shown at CeBIT allowed volunteers to type out sentences and play a (video) game of PONG using just their minds. The technology works by translating thoughts into cursor movements on a computer screen allowing users to type messages onto a computer screen or control an on-screen object by mentally controlling the movement of the cursor. The concept is still at infancy and it needs a lot of refining, but it does have a huge potential.

A new robot for the masses was unveiled in CeBIT: Robonova. It's a fully customizable and programmable aluminium-built robot. The movement of this robot is done with HiTEC "muscles." These smart muscles and joints give complete control of torque, speed and position. The programming software is simple, so any user can make the Robonova do anything they want. But what really sets it apart from its other running, jumping, dancing cousins is that the Robonova is one of the cheapest robots available.

A group of manufacturers built what they're calling the fastest commercially available personal computer, an Intel Pentium 4 workstation running at 5.46 GHz. The Intel P4 3.8GHz CPU had to undergo some serious over-clocking to churn out that kind of speed. To keep things from frying, a cooling system which keeps the temperature surrounding that CPU at a chilly -33 degrees Celsius was used, along with a water cooling system keeping the graphics and motherboard chipset from melting.

Advances in the widely used Secure Digital format continue unabated, with cards now trickling out that support the new SDHC (SD High Capacity), or SD 2.0, standard. Panasonic has just announced a SDHC 4GB model which, although only compatible with FAT32-compliant current-gen readers, promises capacities as high as 32GB.

CeBIT is a huge show, but unfortunately, these days all of the real announcements seem to happen in the US and Asian shows only. The announcements from CeBIT follow a different trend: Microsoft's new Origami, improvements in flash drives, lots of Portable Media Players and (Portable TV) tuners and more capable cell phones. This is a design show. It's not about technology anymore.

But that can be good. Because we know now how to make pretty machines and interfaces, we can hide lots of the back-end stuff from the user in ways that we have so far only dreamed of. Remember the exciting days of 286 computers and 10MB hard drives? All that stuff was complex and hard to grasp, especially for someone without a computer science degree. Now, someone could probably walk through CeBIT with his grandmother and kind of explain to her what's up: "That's a portable video player; you can put your favourite shows on there... that's a computer that looks like an aeroplane..."

Sure it's simplistic, but it's where we need to be in order to prove to the wider world that technology isn't just for the smart and rich. It's for everyone, now, and it's all very usable.