The device was apparently first announced at Computex. I don’t recall reading any news on it but it did make me laugh. Just look at the headline:
Albatron’s “Tee PC inch is all that you need with not an inch to spare
As the article on HotHardware.com mentions, it comes out of the box with Windows CE 6.0 and everything you need preloaded: WordPad, MediaPlayer and Internet Explorer…right. The device has both WiFi and Bluetooth, weighs 343 grams, has a 400Mhz ARM926 processor, 128 MB of RAM and 128MB of flash memory. On the device itself there is an SD card slot, a camera, and a headphone jack while the included docking station has two USB ports, built in speakers and line in/out. Assuming you can get a good time-telling application, it would make for a decent bedside alarm clock ;)
Quick Update: The dimensions are 18.8×11.3x 1.3 cm, and the screen is 7 inches.
Source: HotHardware.com
Even with its low specs, and as long as it was priced accordingly, I would consider something like this. It would be a pretty good tablet for walking around my college campus. The only downside is windows ce, but I would imagine it is only a matter of time before someone loaded up an alternative os
all that i need? haha – right…
If its runs remote desktop sessions and has decent battery, ill buy one.
Folks!,kornel! – this is umpc site not super-hiper-ultra-hardware etc. Most important informations not included in this “news”
-first – Dimensions and screen size
Dimensions 18.8×11.3×1.29 cm and 7inch. Very thin and very small
-second – weight
only 343 gram !!
I ask when this screen size and this weight come in PC area? Asus R50 only 5,6 inch and bigger and heavier
My dream Samsung Q2 with this dimensions and weight
ps.sorry for my english
Well if this were priced aggressively (< $149) I would buy one. Put Opera Mini on it and it would be a great couch surfing device with that 7″ screen! With the supposed VGA 30fps decoding capability, TCPMP or CorePlayer would serve as a fantastic PMP to watch movies on a plane using an SD card (why oh why did HTC not include SD support in the Shift in Snapvue???). Couple this with the huge battery and you get the real value of WinCE: instant-on plus long battery life.
With a zero-footprint (18.8×11.3×0.6?) touch-type bluetooth keyboard and at least a 6-hour battery, I’d pay up to $400 for it. I’d carry it to meetings for taking notes, running calculations, viewing documents. I’d also use WiFi for surfing and email. Basically it would replace my ancient Jornada 720.
I’d pay no more then $160 for a device like this, provided that I can load up Linux version on it, and that it has enough batterylife to go for 4-5 hours.
But seeing the processor @400Mhz, SSD: 128MB, and RAM: 128MB, I can’t expect to run any serious software on it; and basically would throw it in the heap of the ShellOS ‘es, however not having a keyboard basically makes it totally useless…
They are lucky if people still want to buy it for $150, seeing that the Eeepc 701 is more then twice as good.
To be fair, at least it makes for a nice E-BOOK READER. And, if it does handwriting recognition, a nice digital notebook and PIM as well. Or you can tweak an app and use it for home theater or home/car system control.
This is a very interesting and very practical form factor. Comparison to eee pc is irrelevant (and d’you honestly think tablet makers have no good reason to deliberately exclude a keyboard?).
If you can think light, there can be SO MANY USE of such a light device like this. I’ll bet on $200, 300 max. $150 looks like bargain to me.
My opinion is that the divice is not suitable for book reader. man can not read comfortably (and healthly!) on such a screen. In that direction – do someone of you know if some firm has plans to use EInk display on some of the MIDs? For me such a display would be a decesive factor to buy a device, because:
1. I plan to read a lot on tha device.
2. I don’t need a colour display that badly!
My understanding is that all current e-ink displays require refreshing the entire display (which blinks the entire display and takes a perceptible time) to change any “pixel”. So current eInk would be unusable on a general purpose UMPC device.
If the technology is improved in future so that even refreshes can be localised to modified regions, then even if the updates were perceptible in that region then I’d be very interested, primarily because of the energy savings when being used in reading mode.
You know there are plenty of LIGHT POWERED applications one can use this for with its nice FULL WORK DAY battery time, but I doubt it will be extremely affordable, look at PDAs they cost more than Netbooks, you know I think you’ll pay the same right now for a 9-10″ LCD photoframe as you will for the cheapest 9″ Netbook so :)
My Samsung Nexio S160 costed me more than $1000, I thought it was perfect (like this one) for its 800×480 screen and hardware keyboard. It turned out to be crap. Battery life is less than 1 hour and the beautiful keyboard is useless.
Whenever you buy a gadget designed by Korean companies, make sure you played with it before you pay. They all look very attractive and perfect but you’ll be disappointed soon when you put your hands on it. What you get is what you get, forget about any upgrading and post-sale support.
Poor battery life, cool features but bad performance on the major function, full of bugs, not user friendly design… are the characters of Korean products.
Well, i’m curious at just how many Korean-designed products you’ve observed before you came to that ‘character’ conclusion.
And isn’t Albatron Taiwanese anyway? :p
Albatron or Albatros? ;-) I see these Win CE devices on Ebay being flouted as UMPC all the time. Even as a bedside clock it looks like an expensive paper weight
Although Windows Mobile is built on Windows CE, the latter is garbage to general public. There is virtually no application that runs on CE. CE is meant for a specific implementation such as a kiosk, not for general consumer devices like XP for PCs and WM for phones. I have no idea why Korean companies are still making CE devices for the general consumer market. An engineer who can design such cool devices cannot be such stupid to build something that has no application to run on it.
To software developers, programing an application for CE is far more costly, time and money wise, than XP. DotNet is easy, but horrible, even much worse than Java. This is why there is no application for this OS and why MID and UMPC developers have chosen Linux (iPhone, Mylo, Aigo, M528, eee PC…). To device developers, Linux is sure far more difficult than CE. Seems Korea is far behind Japan and China on Linux.
Fixup is right. Windows CE isn’t windows mobile. If you are looking for a device that does ahem “everything you need right out of the box” and those everythings are limited. then this limited device might be ok for you–two years ago. seriously, I love windows mobile and I chafe at its limitations. in the current market spend a little more for a netbook or a wm device or wait six month to see what cool devices that are coming out.
There are plenty of WinCE prgs out there but nowhere as many as there are WinMO prgs, but then again WinMO is now becoming history too and not all WinMO prgs work on the current Windows Mobile OS either. There are in fact plenty of prgs even dating back to the HPC era that work on WinCE devices, now how many of such prgs anyone wants anymore is a different story.
Personally I believe WinCE gets a worse rep than it deserves it has a lot of benefits but yes it’s usage is limited but when it comes to battery life or simple computing for someone not familiar much with computers it offers a great option, and you can hardly go wrong on them they are pretty fool proof, even if you hit the hard reset your just back up and running in a short time no major changes to the device.
Personally i don’t think much of win CE either. Thus i think of this Taiwanese* device as an experimental product. It’s the form factor that matter, so thin and much lighter than current bulky 7″ UMPCs (even still thinner and lighter compared to 4.8/5-inchers!). And i suppose in a year or two, full ‘desktop OS’ is going to fit into a much more capable hardware (compared to current Atom) the size and weight of this. That’s why i like to tinker with it, to even develop some light client apps as… well, experiment.
Surely the “all you need” marketing doesn’t make sense. It’s going to be a niche product. And it’s going to need very low price and very long battery life to survive that niche market.
* it’s getting funny, fixup got me confused and i checked:
Albatron Technology Company Ltd.
International public company
6F No. 716 Chung Cheng Rd., Chung-Ho, , Taiwan
()886 02 8227 3277, 886 02 8227 3266 fax, http://www.albatron.com.tw
ah well, maybe the Korean thing is just something else
oh yeah, developing software for multi-platform is becoming so much easier wih cross-platform GUI toolkits like wxwidget and Qt, not just .Net and Java (both of which are actually getting better), which, combined with language like python it’s pretty much a rapid one. It’s not like you have to write from scratch for every platform. Maintenance for each platform will obviously demand more resource though.
Has anyone heard any more on this. The website offers nothing more than a post on Aug about the product.
I own one. Seems pretty good!
Jack – where did you get it? I have been waiting for these to be released to run a single non routing gps navigation app – Windows CE is all I need for this.