Here’s a blog to watch if you’re interested in Ultra Mobile PC’s. Wendell Wenjen is a “product development manager of ultra-mobile consumer electronics devices at a large Silicon Valley semiconductor company” and his blog is nicely focused on consumer product marketing and Ultra Mobile PC’s. I wonder which large Silicon Valley company he works at. Well, seeing as this blog entry talks exclusively about his products that appeared on the Intel Ultra Mobile Computing stand at CES, I think we can safely make the obvious assumption.

“I’ll continue to add more comments about these and other devices as they get closer to introduction.” he says. This is an interesting statement considering Intel don’t sell consumer electronics products. I assumed that these UMPCs were technology demonstrators but maybe Intel have sold the designs to a manufacturer. I’m all ears and will be looking out for Wendell and his devices at CeBit in a few weeks with the following questions in hand:

• Why are Intel, chip technology experts, making UMPC products?
• When can we expect to see the next wave of ULV Core 2 Solo processors in UMPCs?
• Is Tolapai going to develop further into something that can be used in UMPCs?
• Operating Systems on RISC processors (for example XScale that you sold to Marvel) are advancing at quick pace. Symbian Series 60 and Windows Mobile 6 and Maemo are good examples. At some point in the near future the functionality of these mobile operating systems is going to satisfy most consumers looking for mobile computing solutions and bring battery life, size and weight advantages that x86 systems will not be able to match. Where will Intel position its . [This is a question I ask myself time and time again. Windows Mobile, Symbian and Maemo will enhance over time to bring better end-user functionality on a fit-for-purpose hardware architecture. Windows Vista is stuck with an 8GB HDD, 1GB memory, and x86 processor requirement in a market where battery technology improvements are not filtering quickly enough through to end devices.]

In other Intel-related news today, Engadget talks about the Intel Crestline GPU. This is part of Santa Rosa which is due soon. Unfortunately, the first version of the device is nothing that can be used in UMPC’s and ULV CPU’s that are able to use these chipsets won’t be available until late 2007. For the time being, the most important Intel development we need to keep an eye on is Ultra Low Voltage Core 2 Solo processors. U2100, U2200 and the Celeron M 523 which are scheduled for Q3. This brings me to a correction I need to make on a previous article I wrote which talked about 1.6 and 1.7Ghz low power processors. Having just done some more research I’ve found out that the Celeron M 520 and M 523 (1.6 and 1.7Ghz) CPU’s are not ULV processors that can be used in UMPCs. Apologies to those that were getting excited about 1.6Ghz UMPCs!!!

UMPC CPU 2007 update. (with correction)