Over the last four or five months I’ve been in regular contact with someone that works as a designer for Ultra Mobile PC’s. He’s a real UMPC fanatic and in his spare time he likes nothing more than to research, plan, test and play with UMPC ideas and designs. We have been distilling our ideas about the ultimate professional UMPC for a long time now and both of us have come to similar conclusions about what our ideal professional UMPC device should look like and what the specifications should be given the current technical constraints.
I had a semi-serious look at an ideal device a few months ago and also covered some ideas in a post about the Carrypad Office Companion. The ‘ideal device’ discussions ended up with a similar technical specifications although having been through the brainstorming process now, the Industrial Design was clearly one of the hardest and most critical points. What would the device look and feel like? We spent a few hours on the phone late one night and went through all the ID elements we’d talked about in the past - keyboard designs, screen sizes, frame button layout, keyboards and decided on what we thought was a good layout.
I was pretty surprised and excited to get these images in my mailbox the next morning. This is the 1st Draft of UMPC-X!
UMPC-X. Click to enlarge.
What do you think? Personally I love the two-position sliding screen. The thickness of the device is actually calculated from existing UMPC motherboards and designs so its not just a free-format CAD drawing either. You’re looking dimensions of about 190 x 110 x 25mm. We decided on a ‘real’ keyboard but the keyboard shown is just a a flat image for drafting purposes. You’ll also note that there no web-cam on it and we even thought that we wouldn’t need a 3G modem or GPS unit. We carry 3G modems on our belts and have easy access to Bluetooth GPS modules. Building these in just raises cost.
Here is the rough technical spec that we set down as a target
- Latest Intel Ghz-class ULV processor.
- 1GB RAM
- Scroll wheel
- Docking station including PCI express slot. (for external graphics solutions.)
- 7″ 1024×600 LED-backlit screen.
- Slide-out keyboard
- Light touchscreen (handwriting input not important.)
- Mouse pointer and a selection of programmable frame buttons.
- 3 hours battery life.
- $1500 end-user cost
What should we add, take-away, refine? Should there be a Web-Cam? GPS built in? HSDPA modem? What interfaces would be needed? Let us know because you never know, this could turn into the first Carrypad Office Companion! We just need to find a few million Euros and then we can get it on the production line.
I’ve created a forum thread [url=http://www.origamiportal.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=987&start=0#forumpost3470]here.[/url] for discussion and financing offers 
