Joe over at OnlyUMPC has just pinged me to let me know that TabletKiosk have just launched their eo TufTab v7112XT
The specifications are mostly unchanged from the OEM model with the highlights being a 1.2 VIA C7-M, fingerprint reader, PCMCIA slot and top-mounted stylus. I had a chance to see and hold a non-working version of this at CeBIT and its certainly not a consumer device. ‘Functional’ is the word I would use. I’ve also spoken to others who have used pre-production versions of the device. One of them said it ran quite hot (could have been a pre-production issue) and the other said that the screen was really good. I didn’t really detect any degree of excitement in their reports though but that’s the way of industrial PC’s I guess. The only really interesting thing is that they will be offering Linux as an option. It will be interesting to see if they get the drivers working for all the hardware. Assuming its all open source, the distro could be used on other devices.
This is one of the devices I was looking at for a project later in the year that will require a semi-rugged solution but I was hoping for a flash HDD. Having dropped my Kohji from about 30cm and killed the hard drive I would like to know how the rotating drive in this survives the IP53 drop test from 75cm.
Availability is Mid-April and price is not yet announced. Mid-April. This is the date that the Medion, OQO Model 02 and Amtek T770 are supposed to be available. They are all VIA-based devices running Vista so maybe VIA are still working on drivers?
TabletKiosk press release is here.
