It’s day three at TechEd and the 7AM to 2AM conference routine is beginning to take hold. There’s always something to do.
And TechEd is huge. I had no idea. Last year at TechEd San Diego I thought the conference was packed. People were wall to wall. This time the facility at the Orlando conference center is so massive that you know right away that the conference is large, but you never feel squeezed for space. That’s good, because it’s better to have enough air to dry out. Uh, it’s a tad humid down here–especially for a Phoenix native such as myself.
A couple things strike me about the conference so far.
TechEd has all the traditional conference stuff: sessions, booths, nightly events, and bottled water, but the non-conference areas are really catching my attention this time around. TechEd has a huge area of cafe-style tables and chairs divided up by topics and informal discussions. Some, such as the INETA group, are community led. Some are official Microsoft presentations. It all works together nicely as a great place to lounge, talk tech, and network. Yeah, other conferences have had these lounge areas before, but I think it works well here at TechEd in large part because the space is so large.
In fact, it might be interesting to have some of the companies demoing in non-booths scattered about the area. Maybe it would be a manpower issue, but I kind of like it. Informal, but informational.
Oh, and the WiFi hasn’t been working. I haven’t tried today. I gave up and found a CAT5 cable. It’s good to be connected to the world again.
At a tech conferences such as this I imagine it’s very difficult to bring up and keep up a WiFi network–primarily because of the vast number of people pounding at it. Hopefully, the IT world is learning better how to stage the infrastructure. If I were to make one suggestion to conference planners, such as for PDC, is to make doubly sure that the NOC people know their stuff and more importantly have back up systems and processes in place when the network goes down. If history is any indication, they’ll probably need them.
Yesterday, besides playing with the new IBM Tablet PC X41, I also dropped by the Intel booth and learned a bunch about the new mobile dual core solutions that are planned for the end of the year–which probably means they won’t be widely available until next year. But this is exciting. The dual core solutions will be one more equalizer between desktops and deskless computers. Intel made a big contribution to the Tablet market with its Centrino chipsets and now I’m betting that the dual core chips will have an equal impact. No idea, though, on when there might actually be any dual core Tablets. Again, probably not any time soon. But I can’t wait.
I also visited the Motion booth and got a hands on look at the new LE 1600. Nice. Very nice. Deservedly so it even won a conference mobility award. A couple things I noticed about he LE1600: it’s light, it has a thin optional extended use battery that is simply amazing, the pen feels substantial enough to be comfortable but nowhere near feeling too heavy or unbalanced, the screen has the same wide angle viewability of its predecessor, and it’s new brushed, copper-colorish finish is pleasant to hold. Motion was also showing off a keyboard and docking station with it, but I got too sidetracked talking with the Motion folks about the LE1600 itself that I didn’t get a chance to get a good feel for them. I’ll have to revisit their booth today.
Also on my list today is to drop by the Lenovo booth. I’d like to hear about any accessories and extras that might be out there for the new X41.