February 23rd, 2011

Gadget Show Live 2010 Press Morning

Entrance

Turning up at the event, our first site was this lovely long queu of people infront of the entrance way. Thankfully as having pre-booked press tickets we wandered straight past this one…

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and straight into this one.

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However it moved pretty quickly, so it wasn’t long before we were all walking in.

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When you first entered the show there’s a giant Panasonic display, showing off Avatar on a pair of massive screens.

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It was quite busy to start with, as all the journos made their way to all corners of the show.

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Press Day Continued

Using the rule of left so I didn’t get lost, I stumbled along the Gadget Hall of Fame. First thing I noticed was a grammar mistake… what a nerd.

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Along the same wall was the car they plan to break the world speed record with. It has rather a large shell…

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With an even bigger engine.

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XFX’s stand had some 5 series ATI cards on show. See Whoopty’s write up on his exploits there over at our partner site, alltern8.

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MSI had a fancy looking stand, check back early next week for our write up of their hardware.

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Game Zone

The Game Zone got plenty of attention later in the day, but during the press morning there was almost nothing going on.

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A few people setting up some guitar hero equipment…

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and a pro-gaming team doing what they do best, playing away.

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Scan had plenty of things going on, with a tonne of desktops and laptops you were able to play around with.

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Future/Outdoor Zone

There was a cool suspended driving chair racer setup in the Festo stand. I never found out if they were trying to push the chair apartus, or if it was just a cool concept. Either way, quite fun.

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The VirtualAirGuitar stand saw some journos making asses of themselves playing a virtual fighting game with camera. Clever concept but who fights sideways while looking infront of you?

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In the outdoor zone there was a large air filled dome that had some dudes – one dressed like "The Stig" – flying RC helicopters and other airborne devices.

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One place that I tried to get a free sample from was the Vibram Five Fingers stand. They’re some pretty cool running shoes that I have to get a pair of. Unfortunately they wern’t so game on us reviewing them so probably have to buy. Sigh.

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Cars

There was a lot of cool cars at the event, the first one I saw being the Skycar. It uses what the developer called an "expensive kite" to keep itself in the air, but with the fan on its back you can do over 80 miles per hour, and drive on and off the road no problem. At £60,000 its a little out of our price range, but we’d love to test one. Go on Skycar.

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Kenwood had some pretty impressive looking cars…

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with even more impressive boots full of ICE.

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Sandisk had an R8 on its stand. You could "Win a Dream Car" … "for the weekend."

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Pioneer had a couple of cars on display, this orange one being an impressively pimped smart car.

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Not sure what this red one was, but it had a built in Xbox with in-dash LCD…

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And more than a few amps in the boot section.

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Kick energy drink had a really nice looking Focus on their stand. Not sure why… but it looked cool.

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The Rest

Blobo was an interesting stand showing off a small device that they said would replace the Wii. Its a motion controller and console in one. Could be interesting.

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Veho had a stand showing off some of their most recent products. Since we’ve trashed them in our latest reviews, I didn’t go and say hi.

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nVidia had a cool stand with several 3D displays.

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Not every stand was particularly impressive though…

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More coverage coming soon. Check back shortly.

This article was syndicated on tech seed.

Before things really got started at the Gadget Show Live on the 7th, the XSR team were lucky enough to visit the Press Morning which allowed us to wander around and checkout the stands and exhibits before Joe public showed up. This gave us a great chance to scout out the show before really getting into it with some of the manufacturers and stand owners. So here’s a short article with some rather empty looking stands. Look out for some of our fellow journos you may recognise, and a gadget show presenter or two.