By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

TAIPEI, Taiwan–It is extremely crowded everyday and smells of that distinctively strong Taipei street food that is sold in some obscure corners but Guanghua in the heart of Taipei may perhaps be the best place for technology buffs and bibliophiles.

Guanghua is just one of the many shopping areas strewn all over Taipei and it is also the oldest, having been around for over 20 years. Guanghua is located in a stringy area of Taipei and is usually overcrowded due to the small streets that were just enough to fit two lanes of people. It has recently been “relocated” with the demolition of the old Guanghua bridge last year and some of the smaller shops were moved a few meters away from the old area.

In fact, the city government plans to permanently move all of the shops to a new seven-story supermall nearby. The move was said to be necessary for better crowd control and to attract more foreign tourists and buyers.

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By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

TAIPEI, Taiwan–The Computex 2007 IT trade show featured hundreds of PC peripherals from nearly all of the major brands with blaring signs and hundreds of marketing materials. However, in one corner of the sprawling event was a small group of tech geeks who were putting computer components into various levels of stress tests.

The group, calling itself XtremeSystems, is arguably the world’s biggest and most well-known overclocking organization, recognized even by the component manufacturers themselves.

For the novice PC builder, overclocking is the process of pushing a computer part to run beyond its intended speed. This is usually done by tweaking through software or changing the settings through the BIOS. While this enables a PC component to run much faster, a wrong configuration would burn the component itself.

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By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

TAIPEI, Taiwan–Computex is also home to hundreds of new innovations churned out of the research and development division of many electronics firms. These innovations can either still be working prototypes, soon-to-be launched products, or already commercially available. These are just among the few that were found in Computext Taipei 2007.

Multimedia player eyewear: If users are ever bored with using their handheld multimedia players, perhaps they can try out multimedia eyewear. This product has two small LCD monitors as well as earphones. Video can be fed through a cable attached to a traditional multimedia player, such as the iPod Video. The main problem for this is that it does not have any batteries and so has to be attached to an external power supply. Perhaps it would have rechargeable batteries before it is launched in other Asian markets.

iWalk: a headphone made by Taiwanese manufacturer Lobos that has a small slot for the iPod nano. It has a small opening that allows the user to manipulate the player’s click wheel. It has a stereo attachment for other multimedia players.

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By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

TAIPEI, Taiwan–The Computex Trade Show is arguably the biggest technology trade show in Asia. For this year, the Taiwanese government made sure that the event will be as flashy as it could be not just to entice potential business partners, but also to capture the imagination of computer and electronics enthusiasts looking for the latest gadgets, some of which are not yet even available in the market.

This year’s Computex 2007, from June 4 to 8, is the biggest that Taiwan had to offer with 1,333 exhibitors and 2,926 booths sprawled in four huge halls surrounding the world’s tallest skyscraper, the 1,670.68-foot Taipei 101.

Taiwan External Trade Development Council chairman Gary Tseng said they are expecting 30,000 buyers and would grow the trade show’s revenues by at least two percent.

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