The nine-day IT Month expo will open in Taipei on Saturday, with 350 consumer electronics companies vying for attention.
Raff Liu (劉瑞復), chairman of event organizer -- the Taipei Computer Association -- said the show's 1,765 booths were expected to attract approximately 750,000 visitors -- similar numbers to last year, as a result of space limitations.
Despite these limitations, Liu said sales were expected to be up by 30 percent.
"Sales at the expo have increased by approximately 30 percent each year," Liu said.
Electronics giants Acer Inc, Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD, 美商超微), Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦), Garmin Ltd (台灣國際航電), Lenovo Taiwan (台灣聯想), Sony Taiwan Ltd (台灣新力) and TomTom International (通騰) will be participating in the themed exhibition areas, which have always been highlights of the show.
The overriding theme for this year's show is "Loving Digital Life" and the sub-themes for the three exhibition areas are "Convenient Life," "Entertaining Life" and "Aesthetic Life."
The Convenient Life area will showcase the latest Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies from Garmin and TomTom, such as voice navigation, Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone-based systems and map sharing in the "Digital Navigation 2.0" section.
"Users of TomTom's GO 720 model are now able to manually update their maps. It is also possible to receive updates from other users worldwide," said Caroline Hsu (
Netherlands-based TomTom entered the Taiwanese market in May. As a result, this will be the first time the company has participated in the IT Month show.
Hsu said that TomTom is the world's No. 1 manufacturer of GPS products.
In the Entertaining Life display area, AMD partner DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc will demonstrate how AMD processors have saved the company time and money while producing animated films.
Semiconductor manufacturer AMD is based in California.
"AMD's true quad-core platform and the latest Spider platform, which includes CPU [central processing unit], GPU [graphics processing unit] and chipset, will be the highlights of the show," said Neal Wang (王伯寧), senior manager of marketing at AMD.
The Aesthetic Life area will showcase innovative product design from companies such as Asustek and Lenovo. Aside from the popular Eee PC mini laptops from Asustek, visitors will also be able to ogle Lenovo's latest laptop, the ThinkPad T61P, which features facial recognition.
Lenovo will also be discounting its 3000 N200 laptop, based on Intel's Santa Rosa platform and featuring nVidia's G72MV graphics card, from NT$42,900 to NT$29,900.
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