While the M912V had an impressive high resolution display, the M912M, with its 1024×600 display seems to be more suitable for the average user. It’s a much brighter screen with great contrast and even brings better battery life. For 50 Euro less than the high resolution model, this seems to be a better choice. We received the retail-boxed M912M from Mobilx.EU yesterday with the sole intention of checking out the [...]

Sam, via email, asks: Hi Chippy. i want to know, after you fried the Everun Note. What is your final thought of it? Is it worth buying and for the price mark of $900? Would you buy one yourself? Yes, I fried the Everun note by plugging in the wrong power cable. Luckily I had two good weeks of solid testing with it as my personal UMPC before I killed [...]

A quick note to all of you waiting for the low-down on the M912M (LED-backlit version of the M912X.) A retail version has arrived here from Mobilx and I’ll be testing it out this evening. We need to find out. 1) If the screen is brighter and has better contrast. (Likely) 2) How much more battery life we get compared to the M912X (Estimated 10-20%) 3) If it’s cooler than [...]

We’ve always tried to keep up with all the UMPC, MID and netbook products by at least entering them into the database but recently there have simply been too many products to handle. It’s a problem that needed attention so we’ve decided to open up the product information platform to partners that can share the load, offer the info as extra value to their visitors and have the option to [...]

We doubt that you’ll want to sit through the 90 minutes of recording that JKK, Sascha and myself made yestrday evening in one go so we’ve split it up into two parts. The first part covers the Benq S6, The Fujitsu U2010 and a good discussion about why we should all get behind Ubuntu Mobile. Part 2, to be posted tomorrowon Tuesday, includes some great discussion about netbooks. Download here, [...]

I don’t usually spend Saturday morning reading investor presentations and I can’t even remember how I got here but it’s interesting to look at the 22 April 2008 investor presentation from Archos. The personal media player company sees a migration to MIDs happening in the next 2 years. They also say that there is only one Internet, it needs a minimum 5″, 800×480 screen, that the MID market will 70M [...]

A few weeks ago we told you about the VAIO UX280 that was modded with the 1.2GHz U7600 ULV processor and scored an impressive 30,069 in the Crystal Mark benchmark program. This time it is a UX490, the latest UX model, which was modded with the U7600 and the Crystal Mark scores are something to behold. MicroPCTalk forum member Ahn did the modification to another forum member’s UX490 (computercowboy), which [...]

How long, just how long, did we have to wait for this? It feels like years! The first Atom-based MID in the western world finally launches. I’ve been trying to keep in contact with Benq about this since we spoke in depth about it at IDF but where does the information always come from in the end? A UMPCPortal reader of course! We don’t need no stinkin PR people So [...]

Fancy an Eee for the kitchen? One for the caravan? Garage? Our friends at Expansys UK are offering Eee PC 701 Surf UMPCs between 11am and 4pm today for, quite frankly, silly prices. The best thing is that if you order through these links today, you also support UMPCPortal as we get a few coins back for the UMPC testing fund! UMPC Friday: Selected deals between 11am and 4pm, 26th [...]

That’s Ultra Mobile Devices to you and me and it’s a term I rather like. Anyway, back to the story where ABI Research tells us that the UMD market, comprising Netbooks, MIDs and UMPCs. (Don’t ask us which definitions they’re using!) will reach, wait for it, 200 million units by 2013. The interesting prediction is that by 2013, MIDs (Lets assume they mean small, handheld PMP-style Internet devices) will surge [...]

If Intel can prevent OEM’s from using the Dual Core CPU in their netbook and notebook designs, how come they can’t stop Dell using the Z-Series Atom in a notebook? Just as the Dual-core CPU could damage notebook sales, so to could putting a 12" screen on a netbook, even if it didn’t have a dual-core CPU inside. I was alerted to this misnomer [hmmm wrong word perhaps. Anomaly?] today [...]

One good thing about the flood of netbooks is that consumers get lots of choice. Believe it or not, there are a few netbooks that manage to stand out from the others. I feel that the IdeaPad S10 has the potential to stand out; it looks quite attractive, and you’ll see in the unboxing video from Laptop.com that it appears to be slightly smaller than the Asus EEE 1000H, and [...]

Update: I’m currently live on UMPCPortal.com/live testing this out if you fancy seeing it in action. Update: Live session summary below. Today, One of the Canonical mobile team members released details of a new distribution based on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) aimed at ‘MIDs’ with screen sizes from 7-9″ After a simple download and copy to a flash drive the Q1 Ultra booted straight into a live linux session running in [...]

I recall seeing this solution a while back on JKKMobile but Paul from MoDaCo has now got one for testing. Its a 47Wh battery pack for the HTC Shift from Mugen which should allow about 5hrs online time thus solving one of the HTC Shift’s biggest problems. It’s a tidy solution but at nearly $240, it’s a huge amount to pay for 5 hrs of computing time. Paul is doing [...]

Jkk has managed to find a short story on the ‘Nebraska Library Commission Blog‘ that mentions a list of libraries in the state that are getting hardware courtesy of the Gates Foundation: The Nebraska Library Commission is proud to announce that the following 48 Nebraska public libraries have been awarded WiFi Connectivity Grants, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Each library will be receiving a Linksys WiFi Router [...]

You may have seen some news over the last few days that Intel has started to ship a dual core variant of their Atom processor. To some of you that may sound like good news for the mobile world as nearly every new netbook seems to be running on Atom, and who doesn’t like a boost in performance? Well, as jkk points out, unfortunately the dual core Atom CPU is [...]

Pocketables have some new information on the latest Porient tablet, the H12. Compared to the earlier H9 model its smaller (4.8″ compared to 7″) and has no hard disk but it looks like its still running their Linux OS. With the relatively old Xscale processor (as seen on the original Pepper Pad a few years ago – a rather slow browsing device if I may say so) it doesn’t appear [...]