In short, not much.

CeBit 2008 is opening its doors next week on March 4th in Hannover, Germany.

5,845 companies will exhibit at the show, which is down 300 from last year. China will for the first time have the most foreign companies at the CeBit, a position that Taiwan had held so far.

Big brands like Sony, Sharp, Philips, Lenovo, Dell and Nokia are not exhibiting at CeBit.

Sony just made several announcements this week at their Open House.

The CeBit 2008 is structured this year in Business Solutions, Public Sector Solutions, Home & Mobile Solutions, Technology & Infrastructure and a bit of Green IT cannot be left out of course.

CeBit is not CES and so only a few consumer electronics and gadget announcement are to be expected next week. Most of the announcement will be only relevant for the German market and will be old news to global technology interests crowd. There will most likely be some hardware component news because of the high representation of Chinese and Taiwanese companies.

We will, as usual, not be attending CeBit as it is not worth the expenses. We will of course report about interesting announcements next week.

If you happen to attend CeBit 2008, sleep in as public transport is said to strike until 7am on March 4th.
See also the CeBit site.