Archive for October, 2008

Proving that the Italians just never stop communicating is the second MID to appear in their country. The IDOL.

Baed on the Compal JAX-10 design and using the Redflag Midinux software build, the IDOL is selling through Itelco for 449 without contract or FREE if you sign up for a 24×40Euros data contract.  It calls into question the current 500 Euro + price for the Aigo MID which doesn’t have 3G included!

Details here (Italian)

Thanks Minuz.

For our German readers:

I was speaking to Sascha of EeePCNews the other day and he mentioned the meet-and-greet that he is planning in Köln. As I’ve had a few people ask me about meeting up in Germany, I thought it would be a good opportunity if I joined up with him on this event and brought up some UMPCs that people could test out. 

Wann:

Samstag, 08. November 2008 - ab 16:00 UHR

Wo:

Woyton an der Hohestraße
In der Höhle 6 / Große Sandkaule
50667 Köln

I’ll be there on the 8th Nov with as many UMPCs as I can carry and my strange German accent! Hope to see some of you there too. Bis dan!

Via Eeepcnews.de Source: macx.cn

Remember my in-tent Samsung Q1 Ultra test? 9hrs battery life on the Samsung Q1 with 25% backlight? An average drain of 6.9 watts. It was impressive and since I blew up the Q1 Ultra doing some solar-charging tests, I’ve been missing those 5, 6 and 7hr figures. I was just getting over the trauma until I read this article about another Samsung Mobile product with great battery life.

Notebook Magazine have just done a full set of battery life tests on the NC10 Netbook and it looks like Samsung have once again worked their magic. The tests included continuous Wifi-on web browsing in battery saving mode which is a very reasonable test to be doing. Far better than the misleading 2001 Jeita test and much more ‘real-life’ than the Battery Eater Pro ‘turn everything and and run it at full-steam’ approach. The NC10 returned…

• 12% screen brightness: 7hrs 34mins representing an average drain of about 7.6w which is just a little bit more than what I saw on the Q1 Ultra.
• 50% screen brightness, the duration dropped to 6hrs 30mins which is an average 8.7W.
• 100% screen brightness, the test result reduced to 4hrs 38 minutes which is 12.3 watts drain.

More after the break…

(more…)

I’m going to be honest. We haven’t been covering netbooks with very much enthusiasm. Why? Because except for a few, they are all the same components stuck in a boring looking plastic laptop shell. I mean how many more models of the EEE will Asus still release? I have lost track already.

There have been a few netbooks however that stand out such as the S101 or the N10 from Asus. Joining them is the new Mini 1000 from HP. With the base price at $399 you get the standard netbook components inside (1.6Ghz Atom, 8GB SSD, WiFi, 8.9″ screen, VGA webcam); what you don’t get is the boring design. HP has designed what I consider to be the best looking netbook yet. A sleek black case with an imprinted design on the top, glass on the display like the new Macbook and a great keyboard (93% full-size) all in a slim case. If that’s not enough to impress, how about options for built-in HSDPA, 3 and 6 cell batteries, and a 60GB harddrive instead of the SSD?  I want one.

There will be three versions available. The standard black one comes with Windows XP, 1Gb of RAM, 8GB SSD and an 8.9″ Screen and is available right now for $399. A new Mobile Internet Edition will be available early next year and will ditch XP in favor of a special build of Ubuntu created by HP and have 2GB of RAM standard.The designer red version which we have seen a while back will be available for $699 in mid-december, complete with all the flowery details .

Now lets look at the bad things - the 10″ screen is a $50 option, otherwise you get an 8.9″ screen with a plastic bezel around it. Both screens are also only 1024×600, which will not please fans of higher resolutions. Battery life is around 3 hours which is pretty good for a 3 cell. If you decide to get the SSD model you also get a special slot designed for HP USB drives which extend your storage without adding any bulk. Lets hope these aren’t too overpriced.

For more information you can check out the Press release or look at the Mini 1000 microsite. You might even want to go order one at the HP Store.

Jkk has been playing with the first MID that has world-wide availability, the Aigo P8860 [Portal page]. Being the amazing modder that he is, he has already managed to put 3G in it, and has a video demo of the MID browsing with 3G which later goes into details of the mod itself. The video which you can see below, shows various sites including YouTube playback which works great, and I am happy to see that scrolling looks to be very smooth and easy to use in the web browser. The MID manages to load Engadget quite quickly and all of this has my hopes high for MIDs to deliver the full internet experience in your pocket when they finally start ending up in consumer’s hands.

Sascha from EeePCNews.de recently put up an unboxing of LG’s first attempt at a netbook, the LG X110 [Portal page]. It seemed as though the X110 got lost for a little while, probably because of its cookie-cutter netbook specs released in the face of more exciting hardware, but according to our Portal popularity graph, there has been some growing interest.

This is the first unboxing I’ve seen of the X110, and it is a pretty basic unboxing at that. Although it definitely has generic netbook specs, I think this is one of the nicer models out there purely based on its design. I like the air vents on the left side, and the way that the netbook has some curvature to it, but is flat on the left and right sides. Have a look at the unboxing below.

[Electric Vagabond]

Tnkgrl has been on a modding-spree with her new Acer Aspire One [Portal page]. I noted in my review of the Aspire One that some of the important connectivity options were lacking, such as Bluetooth and 3G. Luckily smart people like tnkgrl are here to show us how we can fix some of those important but neglected components.

Moving on to part three of her Aspire One modding-spree, she shows us how to put HSDPA into the Aspire One for 3G connectivity. Amateurs be warned: this is not a simple RAM upgrade, but if you still feel up to the task, tnkgrl has provided a helpful list of steps, images, and a video of making it all happen.

Also don’t miss part one and two where you can find out how to dissemble the Aspire One, add RAM, Bluetooth, and a 1.8" HDD.

There has been lots of attention around this end of the blogosphere lately about a site launched by Intel and Asus. The site is called WePC, and it hopes to collectively gather the best ideas for a laptop. Users can submit just an idea, or a complete idea of their dream computer. Submissions can be voted on by the community, and the site says that Asus will build the best computer (based on community votes), and Intel will power it.

The idea seems pretty cool and I’m very excited to see what ends up happening with this project. I’m impressed by the site itself and the time that Asus and Intel put into it. The submission form includes a few fields to enter a name and description for your idea or computer, and even a widget to let you draw your computer.

Have an idea? I encourage you all to submit it to the site; this is a great opportunity to give one of the biggest netbook manufacturers some feedback and suggestions, even if you idea doesn’t come to fruition. Be sure to check out some of the ideas that have already been submitted.

Not content with having one of the most powerful ARM-based platforms out there, the Open Pandora team have decided to increase the RAM on the devices to accommodate Ubuntu after some successful tests by members of their community. (Video below)

“Expect to fly through the mobile Internet soon.” says one blog post. “RAM is very expensive but we have decided if we want a real UMPC style device which is pretty future proof for a few years we need it. Ubuntu is 20% faster already - not to mention you will be able to run several large apps now without worrying.” says a forum entry. It seems that adding Bluetooth to the spec wasn’t enough for the Open Pandora team. They want to add RAM, run desktop operating systems and take over the mobile Internet world. Well, sort of. It looks like there’s still a lot of work to do to get a decent OS and UI layer organised but judging by some of the passion in the forums, it shouldn’t take long.

I wonder if this is a response to the growing mobile Internet trend? Although the Pandora design may not be the most attractive due to its game controls, it wouldn’t take much to make a separate case for it if someone thought it was worth investing. Keep an eye on this grown-up smartphone because its looking more and more interesting by the day.

Fast forward to 2:30 for Firefox browsing action.

You might not have seen the announcement that Ubuntu-mobile had a last minute name change to Ubuntu-UMPC based on the fact it was targeting mobile computers rather than the lower-spec Intel-based MIDs. Oliver Grawert, one of the lead guys on the Ubuntu-UMPC project, explains on his blog. It was just in time for the release of version 8.10 (AKA Intrepid Ibex) which was went live today.

Before I give you the links to the 8.10 versions (that I’ll be trying out ASAP) though, let me quickly give you an overview of the two distributions…

(more…)

I’m going to keep this short otherwise I’ll end-up writing reams of thoughts (many negative) that are in my head about the Aigo MID I also have (thanks to Mobilx.) I’m going to save those thoughts for my own hands-on post.

Pocketables have posted a review of the Aigo 8860 MID.  Personally, I think she’s being too kind as, out of the box, this is like the Christmas present that wasn’t the one you asked for. The platform is fantastic but this product is not for the average consumer right now. Fingers crossed that there are some early adopters that believe in the platform (as I do) and have time and energy to start improving the basic software suite and that Midlinux take their feedback and pipe it back into the software updater. As with all of the Moblin implementations I’ve seen so far though, there doesn’t seem to be any formal channel for this which could put developers off.

More links, info, specs etc in the Aigo MID product page.

LAPTOP has gotten their hands on a Samsung NC10 [Portal page] that is fresh off the press (the ‘press’ being Korea). Not content to wait around for a US model, LAPTOP imported an NC10 and it sounds like they really like the machine. Just listen to the opening sentence of their review:

The Samsung NC10 has joined the ranks of 10-inch netbooks—including the Eee PC 1000H, MSI Wind, and Lenovo IdeaPad S10—and it beats them all.

You better believe the NC10 must be pretty good with a statement like that. The review is filled with a lot of positive comments about the NC10, specifically its keyboard and battery life. Back when we first saw the NC10, we had high hopes for the keyboard which appeared to be nice and big. The LAPTOP review says that the keyboard is 93% full sized, and the key placement is nearly perfect. This is great to know when several netbook alternatives have the extremely annoying tiny right shift key, to the right of the up arrow. Unless you are Raon and like to use optical mice to save space on your computers; a large keyboard means that you will have to sacrifice space for some other parts of the netbook, such as the trackpad. LAPTOP tells us that the trackpad is undersized.

In addition to a great keyboard, the NC10 also boasts an impressive battery. A 6-cell battery is standard on the NC10 and will provide you with 7+ hours of use LAPTOP tested the battery with continuous Wi-Fi web surfing and 50% battery life screen brightness; the NC10 responded with an impressive 7 hours and 34 minutes of run time!

Chippy’s Update: Laptopmag ran a second test with 100% screen brightness and got just under 5hrs of wifi-on surfing time. They will re-run the tests with 50% screen brightness to double-check that the screen backlight is having such a big effect. In my opinion, 50% screen brightness could easilty add 2W to the overall drain if it’s a big, bright screen and make a huge difference. Keep a watch on the Laptopmag NC10 review page 3 for updates.

Swing by LaptopMag.com for the full review.

Christmas came early this week. I’ve had three new devices in 24 hours! Yesterday it was the Everun Notes, today i’ve got the Aigo MID. It turns out I might have a new software build too (V030 5005) as there is a software updater installed that others have not got on their Aigos. Naturally i’m going through a software update as I write and myself and JKK will be putting the old and new side-by-side in the session later to see what the improvements are. I’m impressed that a new software stack has been released so quickly and it bodes well for the future.

Personally I’m very excited about the device. I’ve already declared my love for the Compal-designed form factor a number of times but had a few reservation about the software (see the M528 hands-on weekend report.) Midinux on the Aigo seems to be working well though. Coolfox is working (although FF3 would be better,) media player and IM, basic PIM facilities, BT DUN and file transfer over my N82 all with a nicely finished (although not iPhone-standard) UI but the most exciting thing are the possibilities that lie ahead. It’s really stirring ideas about how and where I can use this device and most importantly, what the growing Aigo owners community is going to do with this device. With the SFR Mi PC and the Gigabyte M528 due to launch soon and the Benq MID already out there with a similar Midinux software stack, I can see a big community of people jumping on board. Eee owners, Nokia Tablet Owners and people looking forward to the Open Pandora devices will know exactly what I mean!

Aigo MID. Live session 2200 GMT+1 (post time + 3hrs) at UMPCPortal.com/live

Ustream live recording is available if you’re thinking about buying the Aigo MID.

Thanks to Mobilx.eu for sending this evaluation device over.

Update: Mobilx now have a pre-order page up.

The blogosphere tends to be fairly polarized in terms of netbook reporting. In the western world, where most of the English-speaking bloggers, readers and advertisers are, we have a slick range of style-oriented designs that are mostly based on the Intel Atom processor. In other parts of the world, the situation is rather different. The focus is on functional, simple and extremely low cost PCs.

In developing countries, where SMS’ are used to agree contracts between remote communities, the idea of a 10" screen with a keyboard alone would be something new. It wouldn’t matter what’s inside it as long as it provides a basic computing experience and that’s why many people believe (including myself) that the big wave, the big sales numbers, will be in China, India and Africa.

VIA already does good trade in these areas with simple designs based on what we consider to an be ‘old’ C7-M processor. Microsoft already does trade with starter editions of XP, again, something we consider to be an old OS but it looks like the two companies want to get together, with a bunch of others, to really optimise their products and marketing for this segment with a new initiative called the Global Mobility Bazaar.

VIA Technologies, Inc., a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the’Global Mobility Bazaar’ (GMB), an innovative industry infrastructure program aimed at driving the rapid global adoption of affordable mobilecomputing devices.

Through the GMB program, VIA is partnering with over 15 GMB manufacturers and infrastructure partners in China on the development of a wide variety of mini-notes, netbooks, and notebooks based around VIA’s ultra low power processor platforms.

Equipped with the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, these systems will deliver an optimized mobile computing and Internet experience across a variety of form factors with screen sizes ranging from 7" to 15".

[full press release. Website]

There are two things to note here. 1) XP looks like it will live on and in this program, you can bet that its being given away for next to nothing. 2) This looks like an X86-only initiative that will be used in positioning against ARM-based netbooks.

I spoke to VIA about this program yesterday. They are obviously excited about it and rightly so. They’ve seen what happened with sales of cheap mobile phones into developing countries and they want to stimulate the same thing with low-end portable computing devices. Sandisk, AMI (BIOS) and other partners are involved and we should be seeing the first netbooks becoming available at the end of December, they tell me.