Photos: Electronics extravaganza at CeBit

NEC's "Partner-type Personal Robot" or PaPeRo makes an appearance at CeBit. The machine just wants to be a member of the family as it will carry on conversations with people and other robots. PaPeRo will help around the house or even play with the kids.

At the CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany, on Wednesday, visitors sitting on chairs in a tube experience a virtual world at the stand of German communications company Deutsche Telekom. CeBit, which takes place from March 9 to March 15, is the world's largest computer and electronics trade fair. Around 6,300 companies from 70 countries are going to present their latest novelties at this year's fair.

Nvidia says the graphics horsepower generated in a PC using Quad SLI technology allows gamers to set their monitors to extreme HD resolutions, including 2560x1600.

Nvidia announced another boost for gamers--a system that runs two graphics cards in notebooks based on the Nvidia nForce4 SLI technology. The new technology is geared toward gamers who want HD resolutions of up to 1920x1200 while still being able to turn up their 3D quality settings.

Samsung's Q1, which debuted at the CeBit show in Hannover, Germany, has a 7-inch 800-by-480-pixel TFT touchscreen, is powered by a 900MHz ultra-low-voltage Celeron M processor with 512MB of RAM, and has a 40GB hard disk. Samsung says the European model, due in May, will cost about $1,200.

See more photos and find out about the Origami handheld devices.

The R2H from Asus includes a high-resolution Webcam, a fingerprint scanner and--in the deluxe model--a built-in GPS receiver with a flip-out antenna.

Logitech introduced the io2 digital pen which features improved handwriting recognition over its previous model and a new written shortcut that helps people turn handwritten notes into Microsoft Word documents. The digital pen will be available in May for a suggested price of $149.

Samsung claims the 8MB hard drive in its SGH-i310 mobile phone is the biggest hard drive on such a device to date. The phone will run Windows Mobile 5.0 and packs Bluetooth, a 2-megapixel camera and USB 2.0.

SanDisk Thursday introduced its new SanDisk Ultra II Mobile line of flash memory cards at CeBIT. The new lineup has faster read and write speeds than previous flash memory cards--making file transfers faster and thus reducing power consumption. The memory cards, with capacities from 1GB to 4GB, are aimed at feature phones that store music, videos and high-resolution digital still images. They are expected to be available this spring.

Eleksen announced it is working with Microsoft to produce ElekTex-based interfaces for new Ultramobile PCs. The new designs include Eleksen's Bluetooth fabric keyboard and its new USB keyboard which provide controls that can be operated from the case cover. They are available now.

Lower Saxony Premier Christian Wulff hands German Chancellor Angela Merkel a manuscript facsimile by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz, who lived from 1646 to 1716, is considered the inventor of the binary code, which forms the basis of modern computing. Following the presentation, Merkel officially opened this year's CeBit trade fair.