Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies Co Ltd of China and Eston Technology Ltd of Hong Kong were ones of the few companies that exhibited mobile Internet devices (MIDs) at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair (Spring Edition), where a large number of low-priced notebook PCs were showcased.
Eston is planning to use Windows CE 6.0 or Linux as the operating system and Intel Corp's microprocessor for its MID.
When I first visited the company's booth, an Eston attendant said to me, "I will explain the details tomorrow as we will have a decent mockup then." So, I was surprised to hear the attendant say the next day, "The mockup has been stolen. It drew a crowd immediately after we unveiled it and someone seemed to have walked away with it in the confusion."
Eston primarily developed and packaged software for this product, for example, enabling it to turn a page using a touch panel like the iPhone. Perhaps the company was not critically hit just by having its mockup stolen, but I felt that I had gotten a glimpse of the severity of competition in China, where "anything can happen."
Also, Eston presented an interesting educational toy that is somewhat unknown in Japan at its booth. This toy, a "talking pen," plays audio files when it touches specific books and cards. Printed on the surface of those books and cards were dots that were smaller than I could see. Those dots work like barcodes, the company said. It appeared to read audio files using optical mouse components.
"We began rolling it out several months ago," an attendant said. "We have confidence in the sound quality of its built-in MP3 files."
Its OEM price (for a standalone pen) seems to be lower than the market price of a beef bowl in Japan. We provide the demonstration video posted by Eston below.
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