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Introduction

Thousands of manufacturers from China, South Korea and Hong Kong come over every year to show their latest products and inventions during the Global Sources and HKTDC tradeshows making Hong Kong the ideal place to test the waters regarding Asia’s trending technologies. Here is a top five of what we thought was most trending while visiting the October 2016 tradeshows of Global Sources and HKTDC:

Smart home devices

Smart home devices are getting its own section in the Global Sources tradeshow. Security (camera’s) seems to be omnipresent in this category followed by smart light switches. And ofcourse everything can be controlled by the smartphone. Though big companies like Apple, Samsung or Google are trying to become the new smart-home-hub for people worldwide, we did not see exhibitors yet lining up with their technology.

Virtual Reality Glasses

Big, bulky and heavy and inconvenient to carry is the first thing that comes to mind. We start to see more integration of other functions such as audio and video with an integrated headphone and display. It's my impression that there is still a long way to go here before we are seeing a more mature product or product market but everyone seems to be in on this one. The bigger VR-companies at the tradeshows offer high quality displays, audio and VR comes including a games-library in most cases.

Smartwatches

Smartwatches are still gaining in popularity. The average thickness of these smartwatches is still around 15mm and overall they are still quite heavy. Designs of smartwatches seems to be stepping away from the square Fitbit and Apple-shape, preferring the traditional round shape. People prefer a piece of jewellery rather than a piece of technology on their wrist and the exhibitors here are well aware of that.

Small battery-powered bikes

Though we saw some small battery powered vehicles last year already, hoverboards, this year we see battery-powered bikes as well. There seems to little thought yet how and where these will be used, which shows in the design, missing of proper lights on the bikes, bikes being too heavy to carry upstairs and in general there is no adequate charging solution for bikes available yet.

Drones

We did not see much change compared to last year (the tradeshows we attended here are focussing on consumer-electronics rather than B2B btw). We missed drones following the user, inventions we love on Kickstarter or Indiegogo.