What was Commart Comtech Thailand 2010 about? It was a complete IT fair for all IT users. This was a great event that allowed customers to choose products and do price comparisons conveniently. This year, it was held at Queen Sirikit Convention Centre from November 3-7.

But, as a tech-man, what was I looking for? New products and new gadgets, of course. I went on the first day where the highlight was, of course, the pricing strategies and promotions that each vendor had to offer. And there were also a lot of new products and gadgets to be launched.

I went in the afternoon hoping that it would not be packed with people since it was still office hours, but I was wrong. I quickly looked for the star of the event: the TABLET devices, the most popular of which had to be Apple’s iPad. To my disappointment, they were not showing the iPad, but were waiting to launch it on the second day. Still, there were a lot of other TABLET devices for me to see since iPad feedback had been so successful and many other brands were jumping into this market as well. One of the smart phones that seemed to be on par, in terms of popularity, with iPad was the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Personally, I totally see the Galaxy Tab as a close competitor, neck and neck, to the iPad. Other than the compact screen size of only 7 inches, the Galaxy Tab uses the Android operating system, which works incredibly well. Other tablets I saw at this event were the AS100 Smartbook Android and ASUS Eee Tablet.

The next noteworthy section was the New Technology Zone. It featured mostly 3D related products like 3D digital cameras, such as the Fuji Finepix Real 3D W3. The great thing about this camera is that it can take pictures just the way a human eye sees them. There is also a Fuji 3D printer DRP-1 that was designed to support 3D printing, which I think would be more suitable for business use as it is a huge machine. Other than the above-mentioned two, there were also LCD TV 3Ds from Sony, Samsung and LG that will be competing heavily in terms of discounts.

The Microsoft booth featured the Windows Phone 7, another comeback attempt for Microsoft in the cutthroat smart phone market. In Thailand the market is dominated with devices that don’t use Microsoft, like iPhone, Blackberry and Android, the new star in the market. Microsoft’s strategy with the Windows Phone 7 is to almost create a phone from scratch, not just to upgrade an old version of their operating system. In the Microsoft booth they also demonstrated the latest version of their PC operating system, Microsoft office 2010. This booth also featured the IE9, which I hope will support HTML5 (as mentioned in my last blog) and more.

From this fair, my advice from to the consumer is to prepare yourself with information on the products that you are looking for because you could get lost or diverted from what you originally intend to buy with all the price competition and many gadgets on offer.