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I’m back home now after another stint at the fair. I arrived around 1.30pm to find the place (more) crowded as usual. It turned out to be a longer day than I expected it to be. And one that was a mixed bag of dissapointments and discoveries.

Disappointment #1 - VAIO U-series
As mentioned earlier, one of the main purpose of my visit this time was to check out the VIAO U-series which I missed in my first round. I made a bee line for the Sony displays and searched high and low for the U-series. When I finally managed to get hold of one of the promoters, he quickly told me that the last unit had been sold yesterday. Even the show unit had been carted off by its proud new owner! Damnit!

For 15 minutes, I aimlessly wandered around the floor looking without much interest at the other notebook brands. After bouncing between Samsung’s and Sony’s booths, I find that the Samsung Q30 looks and feels much better than the VAIO. Imagine that. Samsung, has been diversifying its interests lately and the fact that its coming out with alot of cool stuff is a very good testament to their product lines. But I digress.

I was supposed to meet Eng Lee and WL somewhere at the fair. But since neither of them had yet arrived, I thought I would head back to Suria KLCC to have lunch (HUNGRY!). Then it hit me that there was a Sony Wings outlet in Suria. Maybe they had the elusive U-series in stock! 10 minutes later, after grabbing a 100+ from Cold Storage and hooking up with WL, I was finally standing in front of the show unit. And boy was I disappointed.

It didn’t look as flashy or as cool as what the brochures and the website had made them out to be. Maybe it was the dull silver on black and maybe the yucky black foldable keyboard and clunky docking bay. The whole package just didn’t look good. Its also quite bulky (not what I was expecting AT ALL), about 8″ across, 4″ high, and 1″ thick. Almost like taking one of the smaller VAIOs, cutting it in half and placing the two halves one on top of another. The interface is also kinda hard to understand. You have to guess at what each button does cause the labels isn’t exactly the most intuitive ones in the world. After some poking around, I discovered that there’s in addition to having a touchscreen panel, the unit also has stick mouse beside the screen in case you don’t want to dirty the panel (if you go to Sony’s site, and look at the picture of the U-series unit, its the little button that the idiot holding it is covering up with his thumb at the top right corner).

Anyway, sad to say, I am no longer infatuated by the U-series. Perhaps, giving it a few years, Sony will improve on the unit and I would fall in love again. Or perhaps, Samsung might come out with a better unit first. Until then, I’ll stick with the standard PCs and notebooks.

Discovery #1 - McDonalds
After the disappointing trip to Sony Wings, I wound up at Suria KLCC’s food court having McDonalds. While there, I noticed that McDonalds was once again promoting its Fillet-O-Fish burger. The double Fillet-O-Fish was back! Yum. Too bad I wasn’t that big of a fish fan. Now if it was the old Tower Big Mac, then it would have been a different story. Along with the double FoF, came the old Blue Fizz drinks and the Blue Sundae that they had when they were doing the Atlantis promotion way back when the cartoon came out in the cinemas. Check out the Ocean Blue meal at McD’s website for details.

Other than that, McD’s has a new line of drinks for coffee lovers to to choose from. Called Coffeelicious, the line includes both hot (The Bold Black, Mocha Breeze, Cino Cino, Lazy Latte and The Classic White) and cold (Iced Mocha Breeze, Iced Cino Cino and Iced Lazy Latte) beverages. There are some vouchers available for you to get the drinks at 50% discount with any purchase. Gonna go get me a coffee soon.

Discovery #2 - Aquaria
By the time this post goes up, it would already be a little too late. We was walking back from Suria to the fair when we passed by Aquaria. A promotion was going on in conjunction with the fair where entrance fees were slashed down to RM18.00 between 7pm and 9pm daily throughout the duration of the fair. Too bad I got home late, else maybe some people might be able to squeeze it into their schedules. However, I’m sure there are more promotions to come as they try to draw the crowds.

Discovery #3 - More notebooks!
It seems that I have missed out some brand names in my first visit to the fair. I put it down to doing it during lunch time :P Anyway, the ones I missed are: Compaq (HP), Hyundai, and NEC. There might be others but these were the three obvious ones, now that I think back about it.

I don’t particularly like Compaq for several reasons. The first being that HP is behind it. HP has a monopoly on my office computers and it doesn’t give us much choice. They are overpriced and underspec’ed IMHO. But that’s just me. Additionally, Compaqs (from experience) notebooks like Twinheads produce alot of heat. If you don’t believe me, then perhaps believe 5xmom. She calls it burnt KKC. Me, I call it the good ol’ Continental Breakfast with sausage and eggs.

As for Hyundai and NEC, I didn’t really pay them much attention. But confirm that Hyundai doesn’t produce any ultra-slim notebooks. All their notebooks weighed at least 2kg.

Disappointment #2 - DELL Axim 51v
Moving along, the other reason for my second visit was to check out the Axim 51v. The good news was that the battery was still alive and well when I got there. The bad news was that it was going to die real soon. As I poked my way around the menues, a warning kept flashing in the background announcing that the unit was low on battery. I pulled up the WIFI config and tried to switch it on only to find that the battery was too weak to power any wireless connectivity. What a turnoff. Anticlimax cukup cukup. Oh well, at least I know that there’ll be a unit that I can play with soon enough, since Lincoln’s already purchased his Axim.

Discovery #4 - PDA Phones
Every PC fair, there’s bound to be one hot item. For the last fair held in August, it was MP4 players. This time around, MP4’s have taken a backseat while PDAs (DELL Axim, HP iPaqs, Pocket PCs, etc) and PDA phones move to the fore front. As we were heading out of the exhibition halls, we were ambushed by a group of promoters showing off an M600 by ETEN (a Taiwan based company). It looks kinda cool with a 400MHz processor running Windows Mobile 5.0, built-in WIFI and Bluetooth, quad band GSM, max talk time of 3-4 hours, standby time 150 - 200 hours, max Pocket PC usage of 10-15 hours, and so on and so forth. Weighing in at 165g, WL says that it feels a tad heavy. Since I’m not in the market for a PDA phone, I gave it a pass. I will however be keeping an eye on it in case I decide to get one in the near future. If I remember correctly, the full package including a number of PC fair free gifts was going for RM2,499 (USD650). Only slightly more expensive that the O2mini.