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The Coolest Stuff We Saw at Computex 2019
For hardware enthusiasts, Computex is the most important tech event of the year. Taiwan is the place where a lot of electronics research, development and manufacturing occurs so it only makes sense that many companies would use the opportunity to showcase their most interesting products. Every year, we pinch ourselves knowing that we get to walk through the exhibit halls and demo suites, seeing some really eye-catching mods, innovative components and powerful peripherals.
Though we published our Best of Computex 2019 awards earlier this week, there were a lot of other things we saw that either weren’t eligible for an award (likely because they were not debuted at the show) or just missed the cut. The 16 items below are the coolest ones we’ve seen at the show and, as such, they deserve to be recognized.
Asus Zenbo Junior
At Computex 2016, Asus unveiled the original Zenbo robot to much fanfare. This home companion was marketed as doing everything from reading to children to turning on smart appliances to helping elderly people remember their medicine. However, Zenbo never came out in the United States and it was quietly released in Taiwan to little fanfare.
Enter Zenbo Junior, a robot that can fit on a table with the same Wall-E-like design and key hardware features as its big sibling, but rather than being a home servant, the Junior is primarily a teaching tool. For several months now, children in some Asian schools have been using Zenbo Junior to learn about programming, because this rolling robot has a ton of motors and sensors that you can utilize for projects.
At Computex, we saw Zenbo Junior for the first time and learned that it will be coming to the U.S. and getting Alexa integration. However, in a head-scratching move, Asus plans to only sell the robot to schools or to businesses that want to use for tasks like greeting customers.
Intel Twin River
Single-screened aluminum laptops are trusty, but Intel’s River concept looked like the future. With a pair of 3:2 aspect ratio, 12.3-inch FHD displays powered by a U-series Whiskey Lake laptops, it opens up a ton of new uses, including a great comic book reader. And Intel went for a fabric chassis rather than aluminum, opening up different forms of self-expression with a device (though it raises some cleanliness questions). And it’s not without some neat engineering feats, including a motherboard split between the two sides with CPU, memory and storage up top and connectivity and I/O on the bottom.
And if you don’t want to type on a touch screen, the concept also has a Bluetooth keyboard that can be placed on top of a screen or on a desk, and folds inside of the device when you’re on the go.
Qualcomm and Lenovo’s Project Limitless
So the Project Limitless laptop from Lenovo using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx processor and X55 5G model looks like a standard 2-in-1. But for the first time, I saw a notebook using 5G data. Since there’s no 5G network here, Qualcomm demoed the device with a Sub-6 callbox. But it worked, and it’s a hint at a ton of potential for people who want to download lots of data from the cloud while not connected to a Wi-Fi or wired network. That is, once 5G rolls out and is actually, readily available.
Azza Pyramid Case
PC case and component maker Linkworld isn’t exactly well known in the US, but it and its gaming brand Azza make a lots of cases for boutique PC builders like Cyberpower and others. The Azza Pyramid case caught our eye on the Computex show floor, in part because, well, the ATX chassis is a moderately sized glass-and-aluminum pyramid designed to show off your components from any angle. But the Azza Pyramid is doubly cool because the company also built a stand/desk around the case that lets you mount the chassis upside down, with the pyramid tip pointed down. This not only still lets you show off your build, but also turns it into a modestly sized PC desk (much smaller than most huge PC desks made by Lian Li, Thermaltake and Azza itself.
We hope the smaller size will help keep shipping costs down so we’ll see the Azza Pyramid show up for sale at a reasonable price in the US later this year. But as of yet, there’s no word on pricing—on either side of the Pacific. So for now we’ll just have to keep our pyramid PC dreams alive as we go back to our boring rectangular RGB computing boxes, which don’t even have a pyramidion or a golden ratio designed to honor ancient Nubian gods.
“Mini TV” Mod, a Raven Ridge System Built Inside a First-Gen Threadripper Box
This is AMD PC mod inception, housed at Alphacool’s booth. It’s a Ryzen 5 2400G-based system on an ASRock A300M-STX board with a Plextor M9Pe SSD, chilled by an RGB Alphacool Eisblock XPX CPU block and accompanying pump and radiator, all housed in a modded version of AMD’s first-generation Ryzen Threadripper packaging. Hopefully the modder went the extra mile and made it so you need to use the Torx screwdriver included in the Threadripper packaging to get at the parts inside this tiny, slickly designed PC.
