HKCCF – Bargain hunters and virgins with DSLRs

My one day stopover in Hong Kong coincided with the Hong Kong Computer and Communication Festival and being such a gadget person I popped along to see what its about.  There was a torrent of people and a 4825km queue to get in, 30 minutes later and $20HKD entrance fee I was in [Tourists had a special line in the end…but I forgot to bring my passport].

Summary :-

• Massive Hall crowded with too many people, it wasn’t like any ‘expo’ I’ve been to, there is absolutely no personal space at all with everybody effectively pushing and shoving each another to get anywhere.  Obviously everyone was looking for a bargain.
• Lots of computer stalls but it the prices didn’t look like ‘bargains’ to me and I come from Australia, the land of overpriced goods and ripoffs.  Most of the stalls were dealing with USB memory sticks and various other forms of flash memory.  The festival was very much a consumer affair with very little representation companies targetting industry and business markets.
• A few gadgets were to be found :-
  • Energizer has teamed up with Xpal to bring LiPoly external batteries to charger your netbooks and notebooks.  I got fooled by the deceptive advertising of 8000mAh…forgot to check the voltage that was rated at…5V…  8000mAh @ 5V battery for $970HKD.  Still a pretty good gadget.
  • Also on the battery front were Sanyo’s Eneloop of batteries and accessories.  I grabbed myself a mobile battery charger that takes 2AA eneloops to provide 5V USB power to devices…recharges off USB too…and a whole bunch of eneloop batteries 🙂
  • Solar cells and battery replacements by “China Legends” who didn’t even have business cards on the day so I’m adding it here as a bookmark for myself.
• Way too many stall bimbos who are on the majority ugly with way too much make up on but not enough to hide the fact they’re ugly.  OK maybe they were ugly but it really felt wrong, there was even a centre stage dedicated to handing out awards to these stall bimbos rather than providing any useful or interesting information.
• To match the way too many bimbos there was an even larger amount of guys with DSLRs crowding around taking photos.  What is the obsession?  Why would you need more than one photo?  They weren’t even pretty! [Ok I guesstimate around 30% to be actually good looking so I exaggerate…but still].  It was so ridiculous that I saw a stall I was interested in, walked over but couldn’t even approach the warez because all these 200mm lenses were swinging all over threatening to decapitate my  head if I ventured too near.  Isn’t the idea of stall bimbos to attract sales by drawing attention?  At a expo so jammed pack with people, these bimbos and horny camera freaks prevent sales.  It was rather amusing actually because I never thought I’ll ever say “Excuse me, you’re in my way” to a line of 3 scantily dressed women just to look at some Sennheiser headphones.

Ah…I used to think Stall bimbos at car shows and stuff were a good perve – walk by, admire the car with a bit of extra good looking bonus.  But at a computer fair with too many nerds with DSLRs, it was all just so wrong.

/Rant over, off to the airport

Oh I forgot to hit publish 😛