Introduction

Slowing down

Once again we’ve descended upon Las Vegas to bring your our annual coverage of what has traditionally been the largest tech convention in North America, Comdex. We say “traditionally” because in year’s past, Comdex has drawn well over 100,000 attendees. My first Comdex in particular also happened to be one of the largest, waiting in taxi lines for over an hour was the norm, with shuttle buses also packed to the max: buses from all over the West Coast were traditionally brought in to handle the demand.

Sarju reported on the lack of attendance at last year’s Comdex in our final Comdex report for 2001. Despite the launch of Xbox and Windows XP (and all the products from Microsoft and others that were associated with it), the tech slump and the terrorist attacks that occurred on 9/11 were more than enough to keep tens of thousands of potential attendees at home. Reports of exhibitors asleep at their booths were floating around, and with so few crowds, getting from point to point for meetings was actually a breeze – taxi lines were at most 10 minutes and there was plenty of walking space on the show floor to get around.

Attendees

Of our traditional Comdex appointments, only ATI and AMD decided to show Key3Media (the company that owns Comdex) some love this year. ATI’s booth is located in a meeting room adjacent to the show floor, while AMD is still in the same location they’ve been in the past three years. In comparison, Intel’s PR team remained in Santa Clara.

With so little action happening on the show floor, we “technically” didn’t need to register for our Comdex media badges this year.

In any case, we’re here to bring you our coverage of some of the more interesting technologies we’ve been able to take a peek at so far. So lets get on with the show.