I started following the Macworld Expo since long before the days of the Internet. But this is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to attend. Macworld Expo is famous for being the place where Steve Jobs would use his superpowers to induce mass nerdgasms whenever he unveiled Apple’s latest creation, among others: iMac, iBook, iTunes, Safari, and of course, iPhone.

Sadly, in 2009 Apple decided not to participate in Macworld anymore. When Apple went, so did other large developers. But the Expo is still going year after year.

I bought expo floor-only passes. The conferences didn’t seem attractive enough to warrant the cruelty of putting Shlomit through them. So, a team of three correspondents (we were joined by Amit) from The MKX® attended Macworld.

About 2/3 of the expo area were covered with every imaginable iPhone/iPad case/stand. Still, here are some of the interesting things we saw from the other 1/3.

Read more to see a few…

DryCase makes these plastic pouches where you put your toy (iPhone or other) and then use a little pump to suck the air out (damn it, I started with a case!). This is clever because 1) it makes the plastic case stick to the screen so it’s usable and 2) it shows for sure that the case is airtight. They sell waterproof headphones and everything is priced reasonably. Looks great for water sports, but I’m not convinced you can use it to swim while rocking some Soda Stereo.

Next, Drobo. It’s a box you connect to your Mac in which you insert three (or more) internal hard drives. Drobo automatically formats them so that they look like one huge hard drive to your computer. Also, it spreads and duplicates the data across the drives so that if any of them fail, you just pop in a new one and don’t lose any data. I have a fetish for easy and automatic backup and this is a cool (but costly) solution. Maybe one day…

SwingChair is perhaps the most impressive desk chair I’ve seen. Forget the Aeron: this is the way to go. It’s hard to explain how this chair works: The back and the seat move with you, somehow, and you are always comfortable. You can see the video on their website but it won’t be the same as trying it. I was really impressed.

This is it for now. Part 2 coming soon…