Taipei Here I Come: What to Expect at Computex

I will be one of the 135,000 people descending on Taipei next week for the second largest IT show in the world: Computex. I am beyond excited to see the CES of the East and am expecting to be beyond inundated with mobile tech. Here are my predictions for Computex 2008.

A Slew of Mini-Notebooks: I am sure a handful of mini-notebooks will be announced next week. Coinciding with the release of Intel’s Atom processor, the top notebook vendors are anticipated to join the  the competition. ASUS has confirmed that it will announce its Eee PC 901 and 1000 series. We will be in attendance at all of the ASUS events, starting with an Eee PC–centric one on June 3 at 11:30 a.m. Taiwan time (11:30 p.m. EST the night before).

We also have gotten Wind about a certain MSI mini-notebook being launched the opening day of the show. Then there are some leaked pictures circulating of an Acer mini-notebook circulating on the Web. Acer is holding a press event on June 3 that we will also be attending. So stay tuned.

More Chips, Please: Though the release of Intel’s Montevina has been pushed back, we still expect to see a few chips released or previewed next week. Taiwanese Via Technologies is expected to unveil its latest Isaiah processors soon, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed to see some at the show. The peeps at Tom’s Hardware are also predicting a big announcement from NVIDIA. AMD may possibly show off its “Puma” mobile platform, according to TechSpot.

SSDs to Capacity? I have received a few e-mails this week from storage-based companies who will have a presence at Computex. I expect such companies as A-Data and others to release larger solid state drives on a par with Samsung’s 256GB SSD.