Frank (Ctitanic), ever the eager UMPC beaver, has posted some interesting reading over at Ultra Mobile PC thoughts about the new eo v7200 series UMPC’s. Some of which I don’t agree with.

Apparently the PDF version of the manual (a 2005 version) is available through the FCC website and Franks been through it and picked out some points.

• No integrated Mic
• No resolution change button
• Mono speaker

We’ll have to get these points confirmed to be sure. For a start, there’s a hole next to the camera which looks like a mic input and also one under the prefs button. Take a look at the close-up images below.

Frank also thinks that the Pentium-M is not a good choice for battery life when compared to the Celeron. Actually, the opposite should be true. The Pentium-M should give battery advantages over the Celeron. The Celeron’s only advantage is price. The Celeron is basically the Pentium-M with some cache and speed-stepping removed. The Pentium-M is able to use speed-stepping to reduce clockrate and therefore save power over the Celeron. From the article I posted about the Origami CPU options:

The Celeron-M devices are Pentium-M devices with a reduced L2 cache and importantly, speed-stepping removed. …. In real terms, it means that the Celeron uses more power than the Pentium and that it could be slower in some operations.

In addition, as Frank already mentioned, if the architecture supports C3 states (the Founder looks like a Centrino architecture. If it’s Centrino, it will have the Wifi as a seperate chipset and not in the USB bus, causing problems, like it was in the v7110.) it could take a marginal lead over the other two Origami UMPC’s on battery life. Of course, we saw with the Amtek model that manufaturers can make cock-ups. Theory and practice are two different things so despite the facts, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Take a look here at some comparative battery life tests on 1.5Ghz C7, Pentium-M and Celeron based devices.

Accessorise.
Frank got hold of some prices for the 7200 series accesories. The bluetooth keyboard will go for $99.

They have also two carry cases: the eo Portfolio Carrying Case for $24.95 and the eo Slip Case for $14.95.

No word on the price of the show-off (wall) mount.

Thanks for the research Frank and if i’m wrong, I promise to send you some nice German beer.

eo i1709 specification page with hi-res images and news links.
eo i1710 specification page with hi-res images and news links.

Regards
Steve / Chippy.