This year's most-talked-about electronic products, the iPad and iPhone 4, may not be coming to the electronics and appliances trade fair IFA in Berlin next month, but plenty of accessories for the Apple gizmos, will be on show.
IFA, which opens September 3, keeps expanding year by year, thanks to its implacable focus on technology goodies that appeal to ordinary consumers. The six-day show is now so vast that it is worth visiting the German capital just to see all the gadgets in one spot.
The fair, which began back in 1924 and is now being held for the 50th time used to be all about radios and televisions. Thanks to its embrace of home appliances, it now exhibits practically everything you are likely to see at any big general electronics mart, including washing machines, coffee makers and desk fans. US-based Apple, which scored a couple of public relations golden goals this year with the hugely hyped releases of its new tablet computer and application-phone, will be conspicuously absent, but paradoxically its presence will be felt.
Apple prefers to show its goods at proprietary exhibitions. Rival manufacturers, who will be showing at IFA their newest touch-screen products using Android and other competing phone operating systems, have little choice but to follow Apple's lead in ideas.
"They are getting closer and closer to the design and style of Apple and that is a gigantic tidal wave," said fair spokesman Jens Heithecker. There is also a solid market for iPhone accessories and applications from independent suppliers. "We will have a new pavilion with 1,500 square metres of space for products that go with Apple," Heithecker said.
Overall, the Fairgrounds Company has sold 121,000 square metres of exhibition space during IFA. All the pavilions are practically full. Space sales have risen sharply. Back in 2007, the fair occupied only 104,000 square meters, according to Heithecker. One of the biggest growth areas has been "whiteware," a blanket term for big home appliances which are usually white-painted sheet metal cubes.
German analysts say IFA has partly grown at the expense of CeBIT, a spring fair held in Hanover. While it still occupies nearly 200,000 square metres of space annually, CeBIT, which has a focus on computer software for corporate customers, has been gradually losing the attention of the German general public.
At its heart, IFA is still a trade show built around television sets. But nowadays they are often called home entertainment systems.
Last year's IFA featured announcements of 3D or three-dimensional moving images for the home. Cinema screenings of 3D movies such as Avatar and Alice in Wonderland have whetted the appetites of consumers for home systems using the same tricks, and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas attracted more buzz to the new technology.
At a preview event in Hamburg, Germany in advance of IFA, industry leaders predicted that most TV sets in the upper price range would soon include 3D as a routine feature. "I forecast that more than a third of all TV sets sold in Germany will be 3D-capable in two and a half years from now," said Gerd Weiner, consumer electronics marketing chief at Samsung Germany. The stereoscopic feature requires users to wear special spectacles that create one image for the left eye and another for the right eye.
Most early adopters say it is not a feature they need every day while watching the evening news or idly catching up with developments in a soap opera. The spectacles have to be safely stored and cleaned.
"But people will want it as an option," said Sascha Lange, an executive at Toshiba Germany. "You have to think back to the 1980s when video-cassette recorders came along," he explained. "People used to have video evenings.
"It will be like that again. The family will be able to gather round for a 3D special night." All wearing their special specs.
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