SUMMARY: Fighting away concerns of SARS, Computex Taipei 2003 was delayed from its original date in June and starts tomorrow with full force. We are also here in force and thought it might be interesting to have a look at the surroundings of Computex instead of only focusing on the hardware side of things. Read on as Cameron "Mr.Tweak" Wilmot takes us on a quick tour of Taipei, Taiwan in the Computex area.
Fast forward many hours and we have arrived in SARS-free Taiwan mid afternoon from our connecting flight from Singapore in rain. After getting settled in at the hotel we couldn’t wait to take a five minute walk down to the Computex halls area and have a quick peak at what was happening and what the usually exciting Taipei sky line had to offer this year.
Our Southern hemisphere bodies struggled for the first little while in the high humidity, but we battled on with the rain holding off just enough for us to deliver you the following shots.
As we were walking around close to the action, we were quite surprised to see that even at 5pm, lots of people were still running around frantically trying to finish all their work for the show as quickly as possible, less than 17 hours before the show kicks off 9am tomorrow morning local time. As we walked past one gentleman, he shouted out something to one of his co-workers in Chinese which we can only presume wasn’t “G” rated by his body language.
However, we can confirm that the brand new Hall 3 which we were told was built specifically for Computex is complete and ready to roll. The building, while relatively small in comparison to Hall 1 and 2, from the outside looks quite nice and should hopefully help ease crowd masses in the halls. We couldn’t get inside to take a closer look.
We walk a little further down the track and around the corner past Hall 3 and noticed a bunch of Intel and AMD advertising is close vicinity. Normally we are used to seeing certain buildings or areas being “owned” with advertising from certain companies each year at Computex most likely accompanied with very lucrative agreements. It was a surprise to see Intel and AMD advertising so close together – suffice to say, this is probably the closest either company will get to each other ever again.
Large Taiwanese motherboard companies, Gigabyte and MSI, also make a large showing in the Taipei sky line with large building ads opposite the front of the Taiwan World Trade Center.
