Glamorous awards show a half-hearted affair

It seems everything at Comdex has been half-hearted this year, and that includes the highlights.

One of the star turns of the information technology trade's annual gala of glamour is the Best of Comdex awards. Held mid-way though the event, the Best of Comdex marks the point at which the geeks, consumers and star keynote speakers depart and the exhibitors are left to concentrate on making deals.

This year's awards were organised by global IT publishing giant IDG. And though it must be a tough job to pick winners from the hundreds of entries, they really might have tried harder to impress.

When it came to enterprise systems, the judges picked some impressive devices. The Best New Concept Product went to Finnish company Patria Ailon for its wireless base station featuring wireless local area networking with both 802.11b and a Bluetooth GSM/GPRS (global system for mobile/general packet radio services). That has to be a cool product.

But in the gadget realm, they really slipped up.

Starting with the good stuff, the prize for Best Notebook went to Fujitsu for its excellent Fujitsu Lifebook P Series. This ultra-compact laptop runs on an 800MHz Transmeta Crusoe processor, and can run for up to six hours on a single charge. It has built-in Ethernet, plenty of ports and an internal DVD/CD-RW. All in all, it's a worthwhile buy.