Sony always have the coolest notebooks, LCD's and other shiny devices we are all killing for, but nothing really stood out this year. There was a wall of prototypes on display, but they looked strangely like the ones we had seen at Comdex Fall 2001.

And there you have it, a wide and diverse sampling of the events and exhibitors from PCexpo. There were hundreds more booths to visit and chat with but these are the things that stood out to our eyes. AMD has some really cool products in the pipeline and are putting a lot of effort into 64-bit processing, introducing x86-64 bit ClawHammer in the second half of 2002. With the introduction of the Thoroughbred core upon us, we can look next to Barton, which will feature a 0.13 micron process and 512K of L2 cache.

The biggest trend by far to hit computers will be the introduction of serial ATA later this year. Now while this may not be the most exciting bit of technology to show up on our doors, it will be very interesting to see how the IDE backbone is transformed.

IDE has been with us in one form or another for about as long as I can remember, and a true change to Serial ATA will be an interesting development for sure.

All in all PCexpo was an interesting show to visit, but I found it hard not to draw conclusions to Comdex which is much larger.

There were of course a few gems to the show. The Viewsonic booth had the highest quality LCD display I have ever seen, and later on at a private party in Rockefeller Center we were treated to a host of Transmeta Crusoe notebooks, tablet PC's and other amazing little devices like the credit-card sized OQO pictured here.