Now that the N350 has gone back to Samsung, I’m back on the Gigabyte Touchnote for a 5-day trip to London and Berlin starting tomorrow. 1.4kg + battery pack is not the lightest but it will last all day and, very importantly, has proven itself a stable, reliable companion; so much so that i’m being very careful about changing it.  The Runcore SSD and 2GB RAM upgrade was the right [...]

It’s hard to believe that the iPhone launched without an application store but it did. If you’ve lived with ‘apps’ for any length of time you’ll appreciate the advantages and probably won’t want to go back to a place without an integrated app store right? Discovery Try-and-Buy Unified Billing Discussion / Comment / Sharing Developer opportunity (money, fame!) Diversity / Niche applications Device Customisation Application control and conformity Centralised security [...]

Thanks to nick95 in our forums we now have an official spec sheet on the Ocosmos OCS1 that we covered at IDF in September. The OCS1 was one of the first Oaktrail products we’d seen and definitely, a UMPC! [Tracking page includes links and videos] 5” Slider screen at 1024×768 looks useful but those controllers don’t include a mouse pointer which, especially on a Win 7 device with capacitive screen, [...]

A few weeks ago I was invited to talk on the Freelance Advisor Podcast. The topic was mobile computing and productivity – my favorite subject! I answer questions from host  Andy White about the ‘cloud’ , Google Docs, Android, collaboration, iOS, MiFi and limitations. Check it out here. (Scroll down past the transcript for the embedded player and download link.)

Moorestown is late. There’s no way that Intel can spin it otherwise because I’ve asked officials many times and they always promised ‘products’ in 2010. All we’re hearing about is Oaktrail and the reason for that might be because there isn’t an operating system for Moorestown yet. Moblin, MeeGo and Android are all listed as supported operating systems but none of those builds are completely ready for X86 prime-time yet. [...]

Here’s the weekly rundown of items that we posted to the middle column on UMPCPortal, our ‘Other News’ section. It’s all good UMPC and MID-related stuff that, in most cases, we didn’t write about as a main news item. Shared Viewsonic ViewPad 7 Tablet Unboxing. Shared 10-Inch Archos 101 Android Tablet Now Shipping. Shared 2 videos. Published Report: Timeline for MeeGo Netbooks, Tablets and Smartphones. Shared MeeGo Conference 2010 around [...]

In our podcast on Monday, we spoke briefly about AMD’s ‘Atom killer.’ Coming from the ultra-mobile sector we were fairly negative about the potential impact of Fusion architecture. A comment on Carrypad made me think twice and take a closer look at the low-end of the Fusion processors (or APU’s – Accelerated Processing Units- as AMD calls them) to see just what might be possible with Ontario. I’ve seen a [...]

Meet:Mobility Podcast 59 is now available. Sascha, JKK and Chippy in a long and detailed podcast about some premium netbooks, the latest Tablets (Tab, Viewpad, Playbook included), and talk about Chrome OS and AMD’s Bobcat. Apologies for the audio quality on Chippy’s vocals. On this podcast: Sascha Pallenberg of NetbookNews – @Sascha_p on Twitter. JKK from JKKmobile – @jkkmobile on Twitter Chippy from Carrypad- @Chippy on Twitter Full show notes, [...]

It’s time to say good bye to the Samsung N350 that I’ve been using for the last 2 weeks and to round-up my thoughts. Rarely does a device slot straight into my workflow as easily as the N350 did. I was able to switch from my XP-based Gigabyte Touchnote (with SSD and 2GB upgrade) to the N350 with no issues whatsoever. Even Windows 7 Starter Edition was flexible enough that [...]

Today Acer revealed 7” and 10.1” Android slates, but that’s not all. They also unveiled a 10.1” device running Windows 7 that is set to launch in February of next year. The device seems to be unnamed at this point, but let’s just call it the Acer 10 Windows Slate for the time being. So then, Acer’s press conference shows that the Acer 10 Windows Slate will be using the [...]

Although I didn’t know this at the time, it turns out that Antix is quite the multi-OS gaming platform. It’s a solution that allows purchase, play, sharing and trial of games between people and different devices running different OS’ (More here.) At the MeeGo conference last week I caught up with Costas Stylianou of Intel’s AppUp team who was demonstrating a multiplayer game. While the game demo might be interesting, [...]

The last time I met ITG was at Computex back in July. The XPPhone was actually shipping in limited quantities then but  it seems that it’s now availble worldwide. Remember the XPPhone is running windows XP Embedded so this isn’t your average desktop OS. There’s also a rather old AMD Geode inside (they call it ‘Super Mobile CPU’ – we know it as Geode LX800 or LX900 as seen in [...]

One of them costs €299, one of them costs €360 and the other, €999. All of them weigh between 867gm and 1060gm. One runs on ARM/Android, one runs on Windows/Intel Atom and the other runs OSX/Intel Core 2 Duo. All are ‘instant’ on. At the MeeGo conference last week I had the chance to check out the Apple Mac Book Air. I had the lightest Intel Netbook (Samsung N350) and [...]

Just a few days after the first ever MeeGo conference I have the best chance ever to take what I’ve seen, heard and learnt to try and predict when and what will happen with MeeGo in 2011. When will versions ship? On what hardware? When will the applications store ship and finally, when will end-products ship both via Intel and Nokia funding and, importantly, through independent vendors. First let’s remember [...]

Here’s the weekly rundown of items that we posted to the middle column on UMPCPortal, our ‘Other News’ section. It’s all good UMPC and MID-related stuff that, in most cases, we didn’t write about as a main news item. Shared Asus Eee PC 1015PN Reviewed: Ion Netbook Has Graphics Brawn, Low IQ. Shared ViewSonic G-Tablet Now With Working Flash. Shared Jolibook no longer camera shy, opens its lid on Flickr. [...]

Update: Ben has already posted some U.S.-related news along with some interesting thoughts on the design. Check out his post here. Information coming though from a couple of German blogs over the last hour indicate that the Duo is going to launch for 549 Euro with the N550 CPU, 2GB RAM and a Broadcom video accelerator. Over at NDevil we get hands-on from a press conference. Comparison with the Samsung [...]

According to Brooke Crothers from Cnet who cites “industry sources familiar with the launch plans”, the Dell Duo [tracking page] could launch on November 23rd. I’m torn between loving and hating the Dell Duo. For one, I think they have a very interesting take on the convertible form-factor. It’s novel and will definitely get the attention it’s looking for from consumers. I can see people looking at it next to [...]