Not much to report from CeBit or DMD

Sandro and I checked out the shows today with a free pass for CeBit and found the floor to be almost depressingly quiet. The main (actually only) highlight was a very quick hands on with the OQO 01. Sorry we talked about but honestly spaced pictures as we only had a minute or two to deal with it while the sole rep was packing up to leave.

It’s definitely slick! I was impressed with the feel, which is distinctly metal. The slider which reveals the keyboard has great tactile feedback and a satisfying click as it opens. It’s better than the feel of the slider on my T3.

Size is excellent and surprising. It’s only a bit larger than the Palm, but and while much heavier, it’s not really heavy, just solid. The screen is permanently exposed… so you’ll need to have a cover, screen protector or some way to shield it when it’s in a pocket or bag. The screen itself seemed quite nice. When the Windows XP system booted up, it was easy to read and very crisp. While we did not read much other than a clean windows desktop with some icons, it seems fair to say it would be a nice screen to read and work with frequently.

We really did not get to play much with it so I have nothing to say about the keyboard’s response other than it seems kind of flat like a Sony PDA, rather than a Treo or Blackberry. I guess people will have to get used to it like all things… There is a rubberized mousing device like the nipple on a ThinkPad, but flatter. There are two mouse buttons on the far left side which give you a left (top) and right (bottom) click.

Should be interesting to see how these sell when they are finally released this fall.. ahem. We were told OQO is trying to keep the price below $2,000 which is incredibly rich for a gadget, so I’d expect only those who need to have it to buy the early ones, outside of the mobile workers OQO has reported testing with now.

DMD was much more crowded and happening, but was not of much interest considering the sheer number of print and data vendors. I was kind of hoping for some more tech providers in the space…

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