Do check out Part I, Part II and Part III of Techgoondu’s coverage at Sitex ’08 if you haven’t, where Alf did a bang-up job covering most of the stuff. Here’s my additional two cents:
Sitex isn’t a show just for electronic gadgets it seems. I saw cars, handbags, exercise equipment, and even one booth selling spa treatments(!).
Quite a few of these booths are at the back corner of Hall 5. Maybe hang zeng pai and the organizers had to price the booth space cheaply to get the vendors in.
Every IT fair the prices of memory cards go down. 2GB Micro SDs were going for S$6 at the Kingston booth, but the best size-for-price option is the 8GB one, which was sold at S$31.
I only saw the 16GB Micro SD card at the SanDisk booth, and it was going at S$112. Check out the 8GB CompactFlash going at S$79, and the 8GB Cruzer Micro thumbdrive going for S$26 in this chart below at their booth:
Was really quite tempted to buy one of those colorful Western Digital portable 2.5” USB (no firewire) external hard drives below. S$129.90 for 320GB, which for me is the best size-for-price option. Price range roughly similar to the Maxtor, Seagate and Hitachi hard drives, but I liked the Western Digital colors and design.
Lastly, a comment on the general clueless nature of salespeople at Sitex (and other IT shows in general). Some are really sotong blur.
Here’s an example. I asked a lady about a Navicom device, one of those GPS travel assistants for the road. She told me that it didn’t use GPS, only satellite. Errr… isn’t GPS satellite?
Here’s another. I was interested in the Linux-based Ee PC mini-laptop – it’s cheap and I think it’s quite cool – so I went to the Asus booth to look around. Asked a sales staff what Linux version they were using: was it Ubuntu? He confidently replied that it was only Linux, not Ubuntu. I spent minutes trying to convince him that Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux, but wasn’t successful I think.
So I asked another sales staff the same question. He read off the brochure and told me GNU Linux. I said, yes, GNU is part of the operating system, but what Linux distribution? Blank stares.
we bought some exercise equipment from a local supplier and most of them are made in china. i do not know if those exercise equipment would last long.’-“
yup. standing at the laptops section, i asked a girl at the HP booth if they have desktops; and she said yeah, and pointed to the laptops. -_-” they had to check when asked if streamline is a micropc, the computer has a dedicated soundcard, uses the normal power supply etc. but ‘desktops’…. *shakes head*
Clueless is right! But worse than that is sales people who pretend they know then mislead people. I guess I’m not expecting them to be experts since they’re probably paid little and hired at the last minute. But this just goes to show anyone going to IT fairs really needs to have done their own homework. It’s easy to get hoodwinked if you’re not knowledgeable yourself.