UMPC Site

Sydney Morning Herald reviewed Pioneer Dreambook UM PC 700, which is an Australian version of Amtek T700 / Tabletkiosk eo V7110. Actually, they reviewed the UMPC concept over Dreambook, and gave it 2 out of 5.

For the same price you can buy a Dell Inspiron 640m laptop which is a bit larger but has twice the screen size (plus a keyboard), twice the processing power, twice the RAM and hard disk … well, you get the idea.

As you can see, they didn’t really get / like the concept much.

Here is another Vega review that doesn’t really say anything. It includes a few good pictures though. I think it’s time to see a real review of Vega.

Best Buy is making a $100 discount on Samsung Q1 : Now only $999.

(via JKOnTheRun)

Finally! Asus released R2H’s final specifications with a press release:

* Intel® Celeron® M ULV Processor (900MHz)
* Genuine Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition
* Onboard 256MB, DDRII 533, 1x SoDimm socket for expansion up to 768MB DDRII 667 DRAM support
* 7″ WXGA touch screen LCD, ASUS Splendid Video Intelligent Engine
* PATA 1.8″ HDD 4200PRM 20/30/40/60 GB
* Bluetooth® V2.0 + EDR, 3x USB, 1x SD Card-Reader, 1x GPS, 1x Finger Print Reader
* 23.4 x 13.3 x 2.8cm, 830kg

You may be disappointed with the specs, especially because of 256 MB RAM, and Celeron M instead of Pentium M, but athough i want better specs (and i expressed it may times, especially the need for more RAM in Tablet PC Edition), i won’t criticize R2H for that. Apperantly, Asus gets something we all can forget very quickly : UMPCs are not meant to be primary PCs. They are companion devices. They are not supposed to run 3D Studio Max. Do you remember the first videos about Origami? From this perspective, the specs aren’t that bad, are they?

Although we heard of both models before, now Cnet is approving the rumors : Samsung is planning to release two new Samsung Q1 models : NT-Q1-SSD and Q1b. NT-Q1-SSD is the Flash Drive version of Q1 with £1,399 price tag- £600 more than original Q1 (according to Personal Computing World) and Q1b is Q1 with C7-m CPU, probably a little cheaper version than the original one. We all were sure of Q1-SSD, but Q1 with C7-m sounded very ridicilous to me. (Actually i still think same, i can’t see a huge price difference between C7-m and Celeron M , but we will see)

Samsung also plans to release the Q1b, a version of the UMPC that uses a 60GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and more significantly Via’s C7-M processor — which could help prolong its miserably short battery life.

Carrypad posted new pictures of Asus R2H, with conclusions coming from them :

1) No docking port.

2) VGA,TV-out and Ethernet port on board.

Janusz Gerszberg shared his photos of Samsung Q1 with extended battery (56610 mWh) and car dock pictures with JKOnTheRun.

And this is Mugen Power Battery for Q1. It’s reported to be three times of standard Q1 battery’s capacity by Ctitanic.

You must have heard about Sony’s new little toy, mylo - “my life online”. It’s pratically a degraded Nokia 770 - degraded because of the little low-resolution screen (320*240) and lack of touchscreen, includes a “nano” keyboard instead,with $350 price tag. Sony “claims” you can browse Internet with it, instant message over Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk or Skype (BUT NOT Msn Messenger or AOL AIM) and enjoy your photos,videos,music with the onboard 1 GB Flash and Memory Stick add-ons.

You must be thinking “So, what’s wrong with it?”. Nothing is wrong, excellent product. I’m just wondering if Sony wants to sell small, internet accessable products, why the hell did they shut down PDA section? Yes, Sony’s PDAs were a little expensive than this, but it was a PDA, you could do real stuff with them. They featured touchscreen and higher resolution screens. You could use lots of software with them. So, make cheaper PDAs like low-end models of HP etc, why would you do this? UX40 and UX50 were beautiful products (don’t confuse them with the new Micro PC models, they were PDAs.) , Sony mylo is just a comeback of old technology.

And “my life online” ? Even PDAs aren’t advertised as that. World isn’t covered with WiFi, at least not yet.

Didn’t believe me? Read Real Tech News’ article (looking through another perspective) : Sony Mylo: 5 Reasons Why the Sony Mylo is Doomed to Failure.

New eo (v7110) WiFi drivers are released. You can download over here.

(via Ultra Mobile PC Tips)

You don’t think DialKeys is the only one, do you? James is writing about a new On Screen Keyboard (OSK) software, Ilium InScribe. He used it on Sony U71 and really liked it:

You can’t tell from these screen shots but as you drag the pen to spell the word a thin black line is visible on the keyboard to show the pen path. It really is very easy to use InScribe and Ilium has done an excellent job porting this over from the Handheld PC platform. One of the handiest features is the delete word key as it’s very fast to just rekey a word that you flub by hitting the key and entering it again.

I was investigating OSK software even before UMPCs came out, and there are really good solutions. Some of them even let you create your own layout with special characters, but it looks like InScribe will be a good one too.