On Friday 22 October I’ve been in Milan to attend SMAU 2004, the 41st International Exhibition of ICT and Consumer Electronics, the biggest event of this kind in Italy.

Although it’s getting smaller at every edition and this year even the big telecommunication operators such as TIM, Vodafone and Tiscali weren’t present, I’ve been able to spot something interesting in both the Windows Mobile and Palm worlds, to meet some old friends and to make a few new contacts.

In particular it has been a pleasure to meet again with Giorgio Cifani and Pino Paparone, the two Italian Microsoft MVPs for mobile devices, Enrico of Pocket PC Italia and Diego, editor of the Italian magazine Il Mio Palmare. There was even the troupe of Netcafé walking around the stands. 🙂

Here are some pictures I shot at the show. The first one is pretty curious. The new Asus A730 in VGA landscape mode with its 1.3Mpixel integrated camera pointed towards the HP stand, where visitors could find notebooks and printers, but alas none of their new iPAQs…

In the Windows Mobile corner of the big Microsoft stand Enrico showed me the new Qtek 9090, the Qtek 8010, the iPAQ 1710 and the Sagem My S7. For the Palm side of things at the Palmosoft stand I’ve been able to make a confrontation between the Tungsten T3 and the brand new Tungsten T5, both in 480×320 landscape mode.

At the end of the day I even got a good deal by purchasing the 2 DVDs box of the Schindler’s List movie, which I was searching for some time but I was not willing to pay it at full retail price. 😉