Hong Kong has different types of exhibitions focused either on the vendor or the consumer. The big consumer show is the Hong Kong Computer and Communications Expo, which was held 21-24 August 2009 at the HKCEC. Being open to the general public, it tends to be CROWDED. I went on the last day and thankfully didn't wait until the last minute. The last few hours were becoming a mad house as people were out searching for bargains on computer products.
As elsewhere the big push was on items like LCD monitors/TVs, digital TV settop boxes, and netbooks. After last Spring's vendor-focused HK Electronics Shows (GlobalSources fall show at airport 12-15 Oct. and TDC fall show at HKCEC due up 13-16 Oct.), it was clear that low-priced commodity netbooks would follow on the low-priced commodity mobile phone production from the mainland.
But after row after row of essentially similar netbooks, one caught my eye, a vSmart. $1,450 might not sound like a great deal for a netbook until you do the foreign exchange. HK$1450 / 7.8 ~ US$186
It only has an 80gig harddrive, but unlike any of the other netbooks I've seen it comes with an eSATA connector to complement the USB ports. External USB storage can even eliminate the 1.6GHz Atom processor as the bottleneck in computing power. And it wasn't running Windows, but had the familiar orange/brown logo of Ubuntu. The salesperson couldn't tell me which version of Ubuntu it was running, and they were running a video demo with lots of interest from potential buyers, so I wasn't going to hijack the demo machine just to check on further specs.
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