A few pounds heavier (thanks Mum.) and with a huge number of emails and feeds marked for attention, Chippys back. I’m quite surprised at how much news there has actually been over the last week and while going through the feed-reader a lot of thoughts and opinions came into my head that I need to write down. Here’s a quick run down of things that I want to look in depth at over the next few posts.
There was a news story that Carrypad is taking over Origamiportal.com. Yes, its true. A lot of work will be going into that in the first half of 2007 and I’ll give you all the details in a detailed post in the next 24 hours.
I was really excited to see a flurry of posts on the Arima UM650UV1 / Medion RIM 1000. Slashgear’s ‘in the wild’ post made some comments and showed two new pictures but the article doesn’t seem to offer much more than we already know. I really really like the specs of that device and I can’t wait to read more about it. I’m desperately trying to get info out of Medion in Germany but they are really keeping their cards close to their chest. Medion are well known in Germany for producing very good value electronics and all I know is that it will be available in 2007.
The UREN got an airing and I need to take a look at the video that came out. Could it make the ultimate carputer?
There’s an interesting CES session planned about the 7″ screen size. That’s one that I really wish I could attend because I have already come to conclusions about how screen sizes will fit into certain target markets. I will follow it closely.
Loads of people have commented on the HTC Athena and have assumed that its the first result of the HTC UMPC effort. I don’t think it is. You, me and HTC all know that UMPC means ‘PC’ and not Smartphone and I tend to agree with many predictions that the HTC UMPC will run a VIA x86 processor. The pricing rumor ($1700) should be taken with a pinch of salt too. It is derived from an unconfirmed source. I’ve heard a different price and its certainly not that high.
Vistagami seems to be a buzzword thats knocking about at the moment. Remember, all Intel and VIA-based PC’s will run Vista. This has already been proved. It may take a number of months for drivers to appear for some of the specialist components but I feel sure that we’ll see many of the 2006 UMPCs re-appear running Vista along with the all the new UMPCs. I don’t get too excited about Vista to be honest. There are some nice touch improvements but there’s going to be cost, work, and instability until it matures. I will probably stay away from Vista until the 2nd half of 2007.
The Tatung ‘UMPC’ post got some airtime. I didn’t expect anyone to take any notice of it because all we have is an image showing what looks like Windows Mobile running. There’s nothing to see there until we get new news.
Other items that caught my eye: A fuel cell for a Samsung notebook. Two great ‘intro’ articles by Thoughtfix that I hope get pushed way up to the top of Google because they are full of UMPC goodness. A solar powered GPS receiver. News on the Docking Station for the TabletKiosk eo v7110 (about time too!) Lastly there’s tiny bit of hope for the Euro Q1B with HSDPA.
I’ve still got hundreds more news items to go through over the next 24 hours. I’m sure there will be some good snippets in there but I’ve got one more job to do before I get 100% back into Carrypad. I need to fix my i7210. Its dead. I suspect the power/charging module has broken. There’s no response from it at all. No lights. No noises. All very annoying as I was using it as my main PC (data is stored elsewhere) and have been testing a new BIOS which has unlocked the CPU under battery power. She was flying but now she needs Doctor Chippy. Very sad.
Regards for now.
Steve / Chippy.
