There are a lot of comments are floating over the net. I made a little collection for you and commented on those.
1)Will UMPC Fly or Flop?
If ipods can fly, everything can. Apple didn’t invent mp3 players or mp3s. And there was napster everywhere back then. Did they become a hit? And they are believed to be working on a “UMPC killer” full touchscreen video iPod. I wish they will release a product like that. It would attract more people to UMPC’s and PDA’s rather than that product. Walkmen and portable DVD players are different things.
And almost every “research” tell us that UMPC prices should fall to 400-600$. I wish they would be ten dollars, but think about all the components and all the other expenses like campaigns etc. And these are clearly not cell phones that only one model can sell millions. I believe 1000$ is “cheap” for these devices. This is the exact money millions gave for their first cell phone (and still giving for the lastest fashionable (?) Nokia’s and PDA-Phones) which were bricks, didn’t connect from anywhere and batteries never lasted enough to last a conversation.
2)Will UMPC’s kill the PDA’s? (or at least High End ones? )
Every hardware die eventually. Some will evolve in other forms. As Gartner and others say, the Non-Phone PDA market is shrinking. Of course it is shrinking because PDA-Phones are expanding enormously. When there wasn’t any PDA-Phones, people had to buy both phones and Non-phone PDAs. And even Blackberry’s didn’t exist then. Now people think why would i buy and carry two devices when there is one? But people liking and using High-End PDAs can’t find their solutions in UMPCs because they are much bigger and battery lives are short.
3)Microsoft is believed to be making a ipoddspsp killer , handheld gaming device , with some Transmeta engineers. This attempt would be screwing UMPCs, so Microsoft both giving birth and killing the future’s devices?
Mar 22
