So last week I been to Comex, a huge electronics fair here in Singapore. And of course, it’s all Singapore style, which means a lot of people, a lot of noise, a lot of signs and a lot of people. You really can’t stress that enough, the amount of people. I went there looking for maybe a new cellphone and a video screen and just to experience what it’s like to walk around a fair like that in Singapore. The first day I went there was with my Singaporean flatmate on a Friday. Friday was actually quite calm, crowdwise. We had our stroll around everywhere and checked everything out, all the while bumping into people like you do in Singapore. But on Sunday you get the best bargains, because the shopkeepers have to close their shops and don’t want to bring along all the stuff that they give away as freebies, so you get even more freebies than normally. Yes… that’s what happens in Singapore, you don’t get a 50$ discount, you get 50$ worth of stuff you would probably not buy normally, like tripods, microfibre lens cleaning cloths, extra batteries, memory cards and stuff like that. So Sunday, everyone was there trying to get the best bargains. And I mean everyone… it was so unbelievably crowded that we decided to go somewhere else after being there for only 15 minutes.

Nevertheless, it was quite fun. I didn’t see anything really worth buying that wasn’t cheaper at Sim Lim Square and most stands had the same items on sale. Prices on 13″ macbooks were pretty ok, going at 1700 S$ which is around 850 euros, plus you’d get a free Rollei digital camera. Nikon gear was expensive, they asked 295 S$ for the 18-55 f3.5-5.6 VR lens which I can buy in Netherlands in a regular webshop for 130 euros, which is still 20 euro cheaper. The SB-600 flashgun wasn’t cheaper than back home either, so I haven’t bought the gear to take the pictures I really want to make. Maybe I’ll buy it later, and maybe I won’t.

But the most awesome gadget on display was the Fujitsu Lifebook U2010, the smallest tablet PC ever. The tablet sports a screen of 5.6″ with an incredible resolution of 1024×600, can you imagine the dotpitch on that? It has a 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor, 80GB harddisk, 3G and wifi. It’s almost as real as my eee PC and some might claim it’s even realer. It runs on windows XP tablet edition, with handwriting recognition. The screens of the demo models weren’t calibrated properly, so I couldn’t really test it, but it seemed to run pretty good. If you want to see more pictures: this link has some.

And one more remarkable thing over at Comex. Sony rented like an entire floor to promote their goods, which they do quite enthusiastic. They built a stage on which they let a couple of Singaporean models walk around carrying the latest Vaio’s, video projectors, Sony Alpha camera’s, videocamera’s, MP3 players and stuff like that. It wasn’t really worth looking at all those things, because you would see them scattered across their ridiculously large counters, but for some reason an army of amateur photographers thought it was worth staying there and taking pictures. I have taken a couple of pictures of the people taking pictures, but damn man, they were persistent. I got bored after something like 5 to 10 minutes, but they just kept on going. With quite a lot of equipment too, to be honest. Ah well, I think there’s a dozens of similar Flickr streams now with dozens of similar pictures on each. Maybe I should’ve joined them…