Computex round-up: Day one

Intel Oak Trail, Asus tablets and all the other news from the show floor in Taipei

Asus has launched its iPad killer at Computex

The huge Computex trade show is taking place in Taipei this week, and day one has seen some big announcements from Intel and Asus, along with some eye-catching tech on display.

Intel unveiled its Oak Trail system-on-a-chip Atom platform for tablets and netbooks, which the chip giant said offers up to a 50 per cent reduction in average power consumption with full HD-video playback.

Asus has several new products on show, including an e-reader branded the Eee Tablet, and a tablet labelled the Eee Pad, no doubt mirroring the iPad branding.

Elsewhere on day one, Gigabyte launched its M1405 notebook, which is expected to be available in the UK from June or July with a price of about £1,000.

The specifications start with a choice of Intel microprocessors from Core 2 Duo to Celeron and Pentium in low voltage versions, up to 8GB of DDR3 memory and a 14in 1,366 x 768 LED display.

Weighing in at 1.6kg, one letdown is that, to deliver the promised desktop PC performance, the M1405 notebook requires a docking station, weight unstated. The docking station, half the size of the M1405, has an Nvidia GeForce GT220 GPU with 1GB of DDR3.

Qualcomm was also at the show to announce its first dual-core Snapdragon chip for smartphones and other mobile devices.

According to the company, its third-generation Snapdragon chips have two application processor cores running at up to 1.2GHz. They will be aimed at high-end smartphones, tablets and smartbooks, and will go head to head with rival chips from Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia, Marvell and Texas Instruments.

Qualcomm says its Snapdragon chipsets are being used in more than 140 devices, including Acer's Liquid and Neotouch smartphones, Dell's Streak Android tablet, HP's Compaq Airlife 100 smartbook and HTC's Droid Incredible and Nexus One smartphones.

Remember to check back on V3.co.uk on Wednesday afternoon for our day two Computex round-up.