At Showstoppers, Sennheiser tried to get everyone’s attention with the „True sound“ slogan. The highlighted product is their new wireless headset RS 220 which brings high quality audio experience via wireless transmission. The stylish stand has a variety of connectors, including optical and coaxial S/PDIF pass trough (in-out). While on stand, headset is being charged. There are indicators about active audio input, and all the commands can be found on headset itself. Frequency response of RS 220 is from 19 to 21000 Hz, and wireless transmitter has a range up to 100 m.

The HD 200 series headsets also got their stylish new look with different colours. These models can now fit your current clothing style, and you can choose from HD 219 and HD 229 to top of the class (and price) HD 239.

Until the end of June, NVIDIA managed to sell ten millions of Tegra 2 SoCs (system-on-chip), which is not a small achievement by any measure. Even more interesting is that just with upgrading from Android 3.0 to 3.1, you can expect performance jump from 10 up to 40% on this platform, depending of application.  Another thing is that while Tegra 2 was development platform for Honeycomb 3.0, newer versions bring support for other platforms. One of the slides that got our attention is dated from February this year. We are not sure what is bigger surprise, the fact that mobile phones are leading gaming platform, or the fact that PC is more common gaming platform then consoles, and by the healthy margin too. Of course, games in question are mainly casual games such as those on Facebook, but nevertheless the results are still interesting.

If you have a Tegra base device, you probably have Tegra zone installed. That’s practically Android market in small, but for the games that are optimized for Tegra platform. Right now, there are 18 games, which don’t sound as such big number but still, these games look much better compared to their not Tegra optimized counterparts, making them more appealing for gaming. Good thing is that NVIDIA is in close communication with developers, and they promise that number of the games will increase up to 50 by end of the year. While we are speaking about Tegras, next Tegra codename Kal-El is still scheduled to make appearance by the end of this year. New GPU part with support of 3D stereo will use 12 stream cores and is promising 5x better performance compared to Tegra 2. CPU part will be a quad core instead of dual core utilized in Tegra 2, with clocks unknown at this time, but probably a bit higher than 1GHz speed that common these days.

Intel’s presence on IFA fair can be characterized as strange. Small booth in hall where Euronics has its large booth is little bit surprising. We stumbled upon few laptops an desktops based on latest Intel Core "i" product series, and also a few Smart TV solutions and Iomega TV & Boxee combination. But since Intel actually doesn’t have too many end-user products in its portfolio, this kind of modest presence on this years IFA is well understandable.

If you had any doubts that LG will focus on 3D at its IFA 2011 booth, those doubts will be dispersed the moment that you set foot at booth entrance. Every visitor got 3D glasses and even those with regular glasses got clip-on model. But, it wasn’t all about 3D and other interesting device could be seen also. One of those interesting concepts is Home Cloud Storage. Center of this system is storage device connected to the Internet and all other home digital devices like TV set and even Android powered phone. With dedicated Android phone application it is possible to stream media from phone to TV set, backup data etc.

Second interesting device is Dual Play 3D display. Looks like any other 3D display with one mayor difference. It can display 2 different pictures on one display, and each of two users can see its own picture using dedicated pair of glasses. Very useful in games where playing in split-screen mode will be just distant memory thanks to this LG technology.

Overall synergy of TV (displays) smart-phones and Internet is omnipresent and the best representation of that philosophy are Smart TV systems. Thanks to integration of small form PCs into TV sets and evolution of TV control sets, that nowadays resemble of Wii controller, concept where you need an tablet device in living room becomes questionable. New Smart TV sets have almost every feature of modern tablet devices. Only problem is nonexistence of dedicated application market (similar to Android market on Android devices) so you will not be able to easily add new features to it.

Yes, there were a lot of different displays shown on LG booth but so many models and sizes that we most definitely don't have enough space to just mention models and brief specifications. Things like IPS 3D panels with extreme viewing angles, 3D projectors, single speaker 3D surround systems, displays with pen as control device, 72’’ 3D display and so on, and so on...

At this year's IFA, Canon haven't located their booth in the fair halls, but opted for their own "tent" in the central park of Berlin Fair. This setting allowed them to to fully accommodate their needs, but it probably brought a smaller influx of "random" passers-by.

The full range of Canon products was present, of course. Printers and multifunction devices still make up a significant segment, with a noticeable shift towards business environment. The fact is that "home printing" is less and less frequent while in the business world's printed material is still needed. Multi-functionality and lowering the price of print are characteristics of new models as well as the apparent shift in design. Scanners were not present at the stand, as expected.

Of course, cameras and lenses have been the main focus at this year's booth. Complete product range was available with a few novelties. In "point and shoot" class of cameras, IXUS 230 and IXUS HS 1100 HS were shown. Price of around 250 and 390 € and 12.1Mpix represent an ideal device for a little more demanding users. HD video recording, decent zoom feature, the presence of DIGIC 4 processor and housing which looks like it would withstand less caring customers makes these devices ideal companions for many years. You only need to choose the color of your device.

Canon also introduced the PowerShot SX150 IS, model which offers similar features to 1100 HS IXUS, but for less money and in a larger enclosure. In addition, this model is powered by two regular batteries for those who are often unable tofind a power plug. Larger body will respond more to those with slightly larger hands, but do not expect to carry this model in your pockets.

In the segment of the DSLR, Canon presented EOS 600D. This model is positioned between the 550D and 60D and can be a very interesting choice for those who can spend more than 1000 € just for the camera body. Priced at around € 850-900 for the camera and lens (18-50mm IS) it truly offers much. 18Mpix sensor, DIGIC 4 processor, HD video recording and compact DSLR body - this could be the right solution if you are considering purchasing a camera of this price class.

Besides the full spectrum of video cameras and binoculars, we had the opportunity to play around with different lenses such as the monster EF 500mm 1:4 L IS USM.

With first public presentation of Acer Aspire S3 model, this manufacturer announced its series of Ultrabook PCs. It is amazing how Acer managed to crank up all that hardware inside this little casing. The model we’ve seen is powered by 2nd Gen Intel Core i7 CPU, 240 GB SSD, a lots of RAM and 13.3’’ ultra thin HD LED display. To achieve the thinnest possible design, on the sides of S3 you will find only audio in (on the left) and card reader (on the right). The back side carries two USB connectors alongside with LAN port. Metal casing is very light, and there is a big touchpad (you cannot run from the similarity with MacBook Air, maybe the Apple will sue them in the near future), which is clickable on its lower part. As we found out, the pricing will be somewhere between €800 and €1200, depending on type of CPU, SSD/HDD and additional equipment.

Compared to a tiny Microsoft truck with a couple of HTC models equipped with resistive touchscreen display, Acer exhibited its W4 Smarphone boosted by Windows Phone 7 Mango. This 3,6’’ smartphone meets up with minimum WP7 hardware requirements (1 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 800x480 pix) and works surprisingly fast.

Also, in one part of its exibition space Acer showed a couple of models under the Packard Bell brand (Acer acquired 75% of their shares back in January), and the similarity between the models that these two brands showed is obvious, alongside with the colorful casings and design solutions.

During CEATEC Japan press conference, TOPSTREAM expression catched our attention. Task Oriented Parallel Stream (TOPSTREAM) is a next-generation microprocessor technology that models efficient distributed computing system. The TOPSTREAM distributed system consists of multiple autonomous processor cores that communicate through the on-chip hierarchical network. The processor cores interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal. The computer program that runs in the TOPSTREAM distributed system is organized as a Kahn Process Network (KPN), and the distributed programming is done through the process of software partitioning from legacy sequential programs.

The idea behind TOPSTREAM is to solve three major performance issues on computers. First one is limitation on number of instructions that CPU can issue at a time. Second, speed difference (gap) between CPU and memory that increases at a rate of 50% a year. Third is very important for mobile segment, a CPU performance limited by power consumption.

The scalable heterogeneous Multi-Processor Platform TOPSTREAM enables high performance and at the same time energy efficient design by providing a 32-bit RISC processor as a master controller, and up to eight multiple instruction-set data processor engines, technology not so different than stream architecture used in GPU design.

Best part is that TOPS Systems has designed a version of the Android software platform that can utilize the TOPSTREAM heterogeneous Multi-Core architecture called “Ultra-Android”. Ultra-Android can achieve more than 10 times of the performance and/or less than 1/10th of power consumption comparing to the conventional single microprocessor. Ultra-Android statically and/or dynamically distributes Java objects on to a set of heterogeneous multiple processor cores on the TOPSTREAM architecture. In addition, Ultra-Android accelerates execution of core modules in Android software platform, by utilizing specialized instructions included in TOPSTREAMs processor core that can handle multiple operations within a single cycle.

If you have €1200 to spare, need a Slate/Tablet and don’t like iPad/iWhatever devices, you can invest in a Samsung Windows 7 based 11.6’’ Slate PC. This model is a member of Samsung Series 7 portables, powered by latest Core i5 CPU, plenty of RAM and a 64 GB SSD. It display is a bit too glare for outside use but overall PC works very smooth, no chopping, stopping and similar actions, we might dare to say it is the fastest slate we have seen so far. Powerful hardware makes sure of it and you can use it to check your online ActiveX protected bank accounts and all sort of must-have-windows type of work. As expected there are a lot of extras, and you can buy a docking station and/or keyboard to turn it into media center/notebook.

Couple of new members of Galaxy phones were also exibited. Galaxy M Pro uses qwerty keyboard with a bit small (for our taste) display, but low resolution makes it easier for its 1 GHz CPU to handle, so it is quite fast. Galaxy Note Tablet/Phone/Whatever got its little pen so you can easily use its 5.3’’ Super AMOLED screen, and 1.4 GHz CPU makes usage and content manipulation pretty straight forward. Bada is still making its own path, and Wave 3 is a perfect example. It got 4’’ SAMOLED screen, 1.4 GHz CPU, Bada 2.0, and a lot more to make a pretty damn fast smartphone. For those that doesn’t require tons of Android market apps, and can be satisfied with those (300+ apps) that Samsung guys approve for Bada OS this is the great choice.

The star of todays show is Galaxy Tab 7.7. They shrinked Galaxy Tab 10.1, used a metal finish, made it thinner (7,9mm), lighter (335g), very fast (1.4 GHz dual core CPU) and very cool. It is good looking, well sized fast piece of hardware combined with a personalized Samsung software that works like a charm, so have no doubt about its performance or good looks. The only thing they didn’t tell us is the price.

Besides all the tablets, notebooks, displays and stuff Samsung accented the NX series of digital cameras, with a couple of new interesting models (NX200), and a variety of new objectives for DSLR models, especially close up, portrait and „pancake“ models for specific scenery. Also, we all expected Samsung to present its SSDs sooner or later, and IFA seems to be the right time. Their models comes in different sizes (up to 512 GB), SATA 2 and SATA 3 ready and all in metal (gray and blac casing). They didn’t have the full specs but the interesting part was that all the models are equipped with 256 MB of superfast DDR2 buffer memory which allows them to bring IOPS trough the roof. If nothing this info tells us that they are not powered by SandForce 2000 series controller, but their specs doesn’t look like they are slower then the most popular SSD controller chips.

Western Digital’s booth at IFA fair was located in reseller part, which was quieter the rest of the fair and a pleasant surprise. Two new things that we were interested to learn more about are WD personal cloud and MyBook Live. For both products, WD2go.com is a web address which will provide all local files stored at MyBook Live device available around the world if you have decent Internet connection. Basically, you will see your local device as normal network shared drive at your PC, even if you are not in a local network.

There are several benefits which this solution has comparing to existing ones, such as easy setup, some level of privacy as your data stay on your drives where ever they are, and streaming as it allows playing video or audio files immediately, without need to wait for them to be fully downloaded to your PC. My Book Live is a NAS, but one that can share its content not only on the local networks, but also via www.wd2go.com to the Internet connected users around the world. Users need to have username and password registered on WD2go website. With this authentication method, you can easily and efficiently handle sensitive data, with WD offering this benefit for free.

As WD personal Cloud also has Apps for smartphone (both iOS and Android), it was natural for us to check with them if they are preparing some other Apps for smartphone users. It turns out that they do, and soon we can see official WDTV and WDTV Live remote app on smartphone markets, and action that so many owners of WD devices is waiting for some time.

Another familiar booth we spotted during ShowStoppers event was Viewsonic. There were plenty of new devices for show, but curiously a docking station was first thing to catch our attention. For their 10s tablet they already had one of the best docking stations around and now they prepared new, trimmed down model with very interesting connectors. With two USB ports, Audio and HDMI connections, LAN connector found its place, making it a device which integrates with office surroundings with ease. Next, they showed us a dual SIM phone, which is selling quite nice according to Viewsonic representatives. While technical specification isn’t so high (Android 2.2 and 600 MHz CPU) it still works nicely, and effortlessly utilize both SIM cards at the same time.

There were three models of tablets on a display, each more interesting than other. First, there was a Windows 7 slate, with unique ability to run Android OS in a virtual machine. Unfortunately, beside interesting idea, its execution was on par with other Windows tablets – far from smooth. Next, there was their eagerly expected 7 inch tablet which will be available in second half of September. One of the main reason for delaying its availability is usage of 3.2 Honeycomb Android OS, which, we must admit fly on this tablet.

Viewsonic developed very interesting 3D UI (User Interface) on top of the standard Honeycomb. Still, if you prefer vanilla filing you can easily switch it off, an option we really find useful. This tablet also incorporates GPS with some additional software for navigation, making this a very interesting feature and at the same time enabling Android Market support. Last, but not least is affordable model which comes with two touch resistive screen and in somewhat thicker casing with wider rims around the screen. Its biggest asset is price – it should be around €150.