TOKYO--I'm just back from Computex in Taipei, Asia's largest trade show, where I got an inside look at what might be coming in consumer electronics in the next year.

The show, now in its 25th year, brings together Taiwan's huge electronics industry and commercial buyers from around the world. Many of the products on sale in stores near you probably have their roots in Taiwan, and many of those can be traced back to deals or relationships formed at Computex.

Like last year, the digitization of consumer electronics was a big theme. It seems the industry hasn't come very far in a year, however. There were countless examples of existing hit products, such as digital music players, but some of the splashiest new products seen last year, such as media extenders and portable media players, aren't out of the gate yet.

If you think of a portable media player as an MP3 player with video, then you've got the idea. One of the things holding back these gadgets is that most consumers don't have a ready source of video files to play on them. Copy protection stops you from transferring a movie from DVD onto the embedded hard drives, and about the only way you can get TV shows onto them is if you record them on your PC, then transfer over the files. It's a bit cumbersome.

Koninklijke Philips Electronics thinks it has an answer. The company's almost-finished player has a built-in tuner for DVB-T, the digital terrestrial television format that's dominant in Europe and most of Asia. With the addition of multiple digital TV channels, getting your own video onto the device won't be so important, the company said.

Media extenders are perhaps selling a little better than portable media players, but they still haven't really made it big. Yet for PC users, they're almost a natural addition to the living room setup. These gadgets hook up to your home network and allow you to play media stored on the PC via your living room entertainment center. You can stream video onto your TV and MP3s into your stereo, and run slide shows from your PC photo album on TV. An additional bonus is that many media extenders support high-definition video, so you can route downloaded HD content onto an HDTV without having to wait for Blu-ray Disc or HD-DVD players to appear.

Whether media extenders will be successful this year remains to be seen, but the emergence of standards such as those from the DLNA, which allow consumers to transfer protected content between devices, can only help their chances.

Even apart from Computex, there were a host of new products out this month.

IRiver T10

In the audio market, competition is fierce. Lots of companies are fighting for market share, and that's adding up to lower prices for consumers. South Korea's IRiver, one of the market leaders, will soon have on sale a new flash-memory-based music player that offers 53 hours of playback time on one AA alkaline battery and supports the MP3, Windows Media Audio, Advanced Systems Format, and Ogg Vorbis formats.

The T10 player comes in three capacities: 256MB, 512MB, and 1GB, which cost $120, $150, and $200, respectively. The company says the devices cost less than any of its equivalent players to date. The T10 went on sale in South Korea in May and will hit U.S. shelves in July. There are currently no plans for sales in other markets.

Benq Storage Products

Until a few years ago, Taiwan didn't have much in the way of well-known IT brands, but companies such as Benq are changing that. Benq has been promoting its name worldwide in the last few years and concentrating on design to catch the consumer's eye.

At Computex, Benq announced several new portable storage products based on 3.2-inch optical discs that are smaller than regular CDs and DVDs but should work in most drives. The Pocket Writers can be plugged straight into things like digital cameras, and data can be burned to the disc without the need for a computer. There will be two versions initially, the Pocket Writer PW100 with CD-R support for $179 and the PW200 with DVD-R support for $249. A Pocket Writer CD can hold 200MB of information; the equivalent DVD can store 1.4GB. But in an age of portable hard drive and flash memory storage, it might be difficult to persuade consumers to go the optical disc route.

Epson Nine-Ink Printer

Seiko-Epson has come up with a new ink-jet printing system that requires nine--yes, count 'em!--ink cartridges. In addition to cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, and yellow inks, the system has four types of black. The basic black is user selectable to match the paper being used--either matte black or photo black--and then there are two additional inks, both of which are new: light-black and light-light-black. Epson says the new inks have different densities and can be utilized to get richer blacks and better contrast, especially in photos.

There are four printers compatible with this system, one of which is aimed at consumers. The Epson Stylus Photo R2400 is a desktop model that can handle resolutions of up to 5760 by 1440 dots per inch and prints on paper up to the "Super B" size of 13 by 19 inches. It went on sale worldwide late last month and costs $849.

Sony HD Camcorder

You're got an HDTV, you've got HD cable channels, and you're waiting the HD movie discs. What about upgrading that old camcorder?

At present there isn't much selection in the HD camcorder market, and the few products that are on sale are big and expensive. Sony's HDR-HC1 won't do very much to expand the selection, but it is considerably smaller and cheaper than anything on the market. Through a lot of work on miniaturization, the camera is about one-third of the weight and less than half the size and price of Sony's HDR-FX1, which went on sale late last year. The new camera is based on the HDV format, which means you can use existing DV tapes, and it will be available worldwide starting in July. At about $1685, it's still expensive, but it brings the HD entry barrier down from the independent filmmaker level to the very serious amateur.

Sharp 65-Inch LCD TV

Are you ready for some serious channel surfing? Before the end of the year, Japan's Sharp is planning to put on sale worldwide an LCD TV with a 65-inch screen. It can show high-definition TV at 1080 lines and has a digital tuner and High-Definition Multimedia Interface.

Sound good? Well, here are some numbers that might either frighten or impress you: The LC-65GE1 Aquos TV weighs 128 pounds, consumes 550 watts when in use, and it will cost $15,560. If you're still interested, then you might want to get your order in quickly. Sharp says it will be making about 300 sets per month for Japan and between 1000 and 2000 for international markets.

Sony PlayStation 3

It won't be available until sometime during the first half of 2006, but Sony's PlayStation 3 already has people salivating. Sony has released mock-ups of the game console and preliminary specifications, and the console looks like one mean little machine. There's the Cell processor with seven processing cores, and an NVidia graphics processor--together, they deliver performance of 2 teraflops (a measure of floating point operations per second). In other words, the Cell has about 35 times the performance of the PlayStation 2's processor, and the entire system offers double the performance claimed by Microsoft for the Xbox 360. It's likely to take a year or two until we see games that are truly taking advantage of all this power--the programmers need some time to get familiar with the system--but the days of my PS2 are already numbered. There's no word on price or precise launch details.

Samsung SSD Flash Disk

Samsung has developed a replacement for conventional hard disks that is based on flash memory chips. The new solid-state disk is faster than current hard drives, consumes less power, and has a much higher resistance to shocks. But such products, though technically possible for years, haven't been commercially produced because flash memory is much more expensive than hard-disk storage. So the big question is the cost--and it's one that Samsung hasn't answered yet. It looks like the company will be targeting the industrial and military markets because of the SSD's higher resistance to harsh environmental conditions and shock. It will be available in 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factors, so it can easily replace a conventional drive in a laptop. Commercial production is due in August.

R&D Corner: Samsung 40-Inch OLED

The South Korean company has developed what it says is the world's first organic light emitting diode display that measures 40 inches on the diagonal. For several years, OLEDs have been viewed as a potential replacement for liquid crystal displays and plasma display panels in some applications. They don't require a power-hungry backlight and so are viewed favorably for portable applications. The generally faster response rates of OLED screens means they are also being considered for use in televisions. So Samsung's development could be important, especially as the company managed to make the screen on an existing LCD production line. Until now the largest OLED was a 20-inch model developed by Seiko-Epson. Samsung hasn't said when or if it hopes to commercialize its display.

Martyn Williams is Tokyo bureau chief for the IDG News Service, a consortium of IDG publications.