ConsumerIT

The end of the long walkway from train station to CeBIT entrance...and a long way to still go to Hall 14...

Heinz Nixdorf died on the fairgrounds at CeBIT. That thought keeps coming back to me. And he probably had minions to carry his bags.

It's 8pm on the evening before CeBIT 2010 officially opens and I am exhausted from laboriously dragging my too-many bags from the train station at Hannover-Laatzen across the people-mover bridge to the Hannover fairgrounds.

All the important folks are in warm seats at the Opening Ceremony but I am late, cold and walking into the show. The Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, is on stage tonight which tells you how important the CeBIT show is in Germany.

I descend from the covered people-mover that arches high over the flat landscape, wondering if my final distance will be 2km or 4 km by the time I reach my Hall. CeBIT takes the measure of a man.

Outdoors now, the cold hits me. It's a penetrating Northern cold...the type that bites your nose instead of nibbling your ears.

Open Source clearly works for software. So why not a hardware approach?

The design for the palm-sized Arduino, a microcontroller board, is online for anybody to build and sell knockoffs.

Yet Smart Projects SNC from Scarmagno, Italy (a 2-person firm) will sell at least 60,000 of the microcontrollers at $30 a piece (up from 34,000 last year). Owner Gianluca Martino says he has to contract out production to keep up with growth.

And some other makers pay royalties to carry the Arduino name.

Can an open-source model could provide a new way for makers to develop and improve products?

Ms. Leah Buechley, an MIT professor, developed a washable version of Arduino (LilyPad) to sew into fabric for flashing LED clothing. Manufactured by SparkFun Inc., about 4000 of the $21 LilyPads have sold.

Built on the Arduino design, the LilyPad is also open source: anybody could copy it. Ms. Buechley believes by that time she will have moved the product on. Cloners will be where she was, not where she will be.

Recent open-source hardware initiatives include Chumby (a clock-radio type of device that runs widgets to display weather or to stream music) and Bug (snap-together modules to make a variety of computing devices).

Go Arduino

LG Electronics unveils its 2010 video projector series, including CF3D, the world's first Full HD, 3D Single Lens Type Projector.

Featuring a brightness rating of 2500 ANSI lumens and contrast ratio of 7000:1, this model also features TruMotion 120Hz for smoother images – a technology previously only seen on flat panel HDTVs.

No one and no product could have lived up to the hype that preceded the Apple iPad launch. Not even Steve Jobs who cranked up the hype machine in the first place.

Steve Jobs stood there on stage, iPad in hand like Moses with The Tablet, and a list of his own Commandments: Thou shall create a product category between smartphones and netbooks. Thou shall not have strange devices before you. Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s goods...

But this time, this very time when we knew what we wanted, when we knew what to expect...somehow it didn’t turn out to be the Second Coming we expected. (Actually for Steve it’s the Third Coming but why quibble?)

Yes, the Apple faithful didn’t break ranks. But plenty of journalists who try to make a living out of being sceptics certainly cranked out the critical articles: 10 Things Wrong with iPad, iPad No Kindle Killer, What iPad is Missing...

But it’s not about what iPad is “missing.” It’s about what we are missing.  And we’re missing the point. Almost all of us are just missing the whole point. And the consumer will soon prove us wrong.

This time deceived us because it looks familiar: Steve Jobs the Product Genius (from the original Genius bar) poised on stage, waving a piece of hardware That Will Change the World.

He did that performance with the Mac (but in those days not as many were listening). He pulled it off big-time with iPod. And he did it with iPhone.

What’s different? And why is iPad getting so much abuse?