Arriving at the exhibition centre brought back slightly nervous memories: the last time I'd been there in my previous life at BT, I had the rather onerous responsibility of preparing a demonstrator of our research activities for senior BT managers including the chief executive!
This time there was no such pressures and I walked into the hall to be greeted by two chaps walking around in their underpants. Regardless of the fact that 99% of the attendees were male this seemed a strange publicity stunt!
The main stand greeting new arrivals was from Scan (an online computer component retailer) and this typified the focus of the show - gaming. Which for me was slightly disappointing since there was nothing new here. They had an overclocking tutorial for people trying to eke out the last drop of power from their gaming PC.
Walking past the Zotac stand I was asked to guess how much a gaming chair cost for a nice little LED torch. Despite several wrong attempts I was still awarded the torch with a correct guess of £10,000! The torch kept my children occupied for some time, but of course are no match for our LED torches!
The custom PC builder Yoyotech has their latest and greatest machines on display and were demonstrating extreme overclocking keeping everything cool with liquid nitrogen:
They also had the exact machine used in the Gadget Show's Battlefield 3 simulator.
There was still lots of 3D TV and gaming with Samsung demonstrating their latest monstrous 3D TV. But not much else from Samsung unfortunately. Not even their latest tablets. And not much from the other big vendors either.
All in all I'm afraid the show was a little disappointing. But this was the first LITS and these type of shows need to gain a little momentum. Hopefully next year will be better ...
