The third day of the CeBIT, again rain, cilliness and snow. Even though we have visited today again barebone manufacturers the trend of this CeBIT becomes clear: more and more manufactures change their lines to the production (or at least the sales) of notebooks. Besides this trend a great variety of portable audio and videoplayers flood the market.

Memorysolution has more than doubled their exibtition area, what indicates the good growth of the company. The company's own brand takeMS wins popularity in the european region.  We as MiniTechNet use takeMS as reference for our tests by the way. Memorysolution presents on the CeBIT their first DDR2 memory as well as 24pin DIMM and 200pin SO-DIMM for the new Sonoma/Alviso notebooks. Furthermore Memorysolution offers flashmemory in form of USB sticks, Compact Flash MMC and SD.

Elitegroup turns on new ways and leanes augmented on notebooks. The sortiment reaches from 12“ subnotebooks to 17“ desktop replacements, as well as OEM products for other well-known notebook companies. The following processors are deployed: Pentium 4 for LGA775, Pentium M and the new AMD Turion. In the field of barebones it looks a little dark since the Buddie2 only received a new facelifting and an update to socket 478 to socket 775 while there is no Buddie3 in sight. As the pressspokesman reasoned is the demand for mini-barebones in the Cube format rather small and a market groth in this area is not exprected anymore.

Contrary to Elitegroup, Biostar puts all their effort in the barebones line and is next to Shuttle the only manufacturer, that can offer models with fast chipsets and prosessors. With the new 300 Series for Intel Pentium 4 LGA775 with Media Center Funktion and the black model for Athlon 64 Biostar wants to be more present on the european market. The casing is almost identical in both models and conform to the new BTX-Formfaktor. Fortunately Biostar is not using steelcases like shuttle but high-quality aluminium. Also concearning the mounting they have made up their mind: The whole drivecage and the frontpart can be flaped open to mount discdrives, processors and memory within five minutes.

Soltek is rather refrain concearning new barebones. The company prefers to wait until new technologies have been established. The desire for highperformance barebones is there, but the demand for this producttype is rather small, so that it doesn't pay off for them to invest in this all new technology. Soltek likes to see itself as a company that offers an alternative to Shuttle and is working hard to offer high-quality rather than high performance (e.g. very quiet cooling..). With the I.A. Version Soltek presents a MediaCentre barebone for the first time. The MediaCentre surface runs only on Windows while an instant-on funktion is not planed at present because of cost aspects. Before this unit is sold Soltek will solve some more details on it.

Besides Mitac, Klevo, Elitegroup and Asus MSI is one of the few, that manufactures their Notebooks themselfes. Since years MSI has produced mainboards for the notebooks of other companies they saw this year the opportunity to sell notebooks on their own lable. While last year they had only a few notebooks, this year they dominated their booth. In the field of Mini-barebones has not much been going on: the new Mega will have the socket 775 even though the presentationmodel was still using the Intel 865. The new front looks very attractive while the MediaCenter software is easy to use. AMD barbones were cut out of the programm. As we been asking if MSI is quitting the barbonemarket we received a clear answere: „We been thalking about it, but finally we decided in Taiwan to maintain the barebonesline and produce the mashines ourselfes.“ MSI presents several interresting mobile audio-video player. Starting from 350EUR player with 20Gb harddisc and colourdisplay are offered. The bigger model will be sold for 600EUR and will even be equipped with a DVB-T card. For the coming sport WCS this unit with huge display might become a box-office hit.

At Chyang Fun not much news were to be seen. The company is still looking for a interrested distributer for Europe. The Snote Barebone was optically polished up and the Cubes were updated with a socket LGA775. AMD barebones were not available.

The rather unknown producer X-Micro presents on the CeBIT some new products. Among them is the „Muse POD“ a Mp3 player in Apple iPod format. This percular product is the smallest Video-Mp3 player: a tiny round mashine with a stamp sized colour display.

With the CeBIT 2005 the company LG, which is known from the entertainment electronics, extends its portfolio with notebooks. But probably nobody would have expected, that it will be so many! No matter if it is subnotebooks with 12“ display or desktop replacements with 17“ one thing they have all incommon: a very nice and noble design. A new TFT display for pressure sensitiv stick was also presented. The price of 350EUR for a model with 15“ screen diagonal, 12ms reaktiontime and glaspanel at the front is very attractiv.

At Samsung it was about the same case. Even though Samsung is in the notebookmarket since years they have extended their lines significantly. And it is surely no cheap stuff we are talking about: They look great and are clearly targeting the buissines clients. The department Bluetek presents a new line of portabel audio and videoplayers. Samsungs semiconductor shows first discdrive prototypes of the new Blue-Ray-Disc in the classical 5,25“ format.

Last year we have met this swedish company by chance. This year they have bigger displays in cases of wood and their first mini-barebones from Soltek. Until Swedx will have the outercase of wood completed it will take some more months.