[Hands-up who jumped the gun with OQO news on Monday? Yup. UMPCPortal.com. Ooops. I was so excited about having Simon at the event that as soon as he sent the first news, I posted it. A few minutes later I got the message to 'hold back on posting until Wednesday.' Sorry Simon. It only seems right that I let you post the full story now. Over to Simon...]
Its official! The OQO embargo has come to an end and we can now confirm what OQO CEO Dennis Moore announced at the OQO bar in Islington on Monday evening; a new HSDPA enabled Model e2 is ready and will be shipping ‘straight away’ in the UK!
Martin Day, head of OQO in Europe, told us that from today all of the existing OQO e2 models will be available with HSDPA. However, at the time of writing Expansys are only showing the new models for pre-order and Dynamism aren’t showing the new options at all.
The OQO uses the Novatel HSDPA module which will fall back to EDGE/GPRS as required and otherwise the specs are identical to existing models with a choice of 1.5 or 1.6 VIA, mechanical or solid state drives up to 120GB or 32GB respectively. Pricing starts at 1099+VAT for the e2, 1.5Ghz, 1GB RAM, 60GB HDD with XP Pro which is 175 more than its nonHSDPA brother.
You will see from the photograph that the SIM card holder has been added to the back of the device beneath the battery. This fits perfectly in the SIM card sized dimple in the battery as we expected to see. Some of you may have seen TnkGrl perform this modification herself several months ago and, apart from her having to fashion her own SIM card holder, this looked quite straight forward. Now that OQO have a supply of suitable SIM card holders I wonder if we will see them offering to retrofit existing e2s with HSDPA?
Personally I’m very pleased to see this announcement because I’ve been saying for some time on my blog that UMPCs are only half of the picture without fast, reliable Internet connectivity. I will be testing the new HSDPA OQO in the coming weeks so please watch this space!
[You're probably going to see Simon around a bit more on UMPCPortal in the coming weeks. He's a big UMPC and mobile computing fan so it will be a pleasure to have him on board - Steve.]
