HTC Diamond features Opera 9.5 and VGA screen.

Just announced in London, the HTC Diamond looks like an interesting alternative to a MID if you’re a one-man-one-device type of person. With an HSUPA modem, a touch-sensitive 2.8" VGA screen, GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, Windows 6.1, the Qualcomm 528Mhz platform (as seen in the Xperia) and HTC’s new touch-flow 3D it gets interesting but add Opera 9.5 into the mix (O2 are apparently shipping it with 9.5) along with a YouTube application and you’ve got something that, to my ears, is more thrilling than the iPhone.

The Windows Mobile 6.1 professional software apparently includes the remote desktop app so connecting into your home XP or Vista box is a serious possibility if you need to access full desktop applications.

No keyboard though…..Mmmm. If the Xperia includes all this, plus the keyboard, it’s going to be a very interesting device. Even so, I’m very interested in the Diamond and would seriously consider trading in the N82 for it where it not for the class-leading cam and flash on the N82.

"Available in June in Europe via Orange and the "rest of the world" sometime later" although O2 in Germany seem to have already announced it.

Via Engadget.

Eee PC 900 battery life tests. Thoughts on Atom.

The Eee PC madness continues. There must be 20+ Eee PC web sites by now and every day there’s at least one good set of new information. I’ve even seen a couple of Eee PC books on Amazon which just shows what sort of a market there must be out there. The Eee PC ecosystem alone must be ten times larger that that of the traditional UMPC market and that’s not including the rest of the netbook market! There’s no way we can highlight all the news here in the front page but we are trying to get all the good article links into the links database so that you have a nice central point to find them all when needed. Today, it’s the turn of Blogeee who have written up, what looks like an extensive review on the French language website. One part of it I do understand is the battery life testing section which highlights the extreme end of the battery capacity issue where some users are getting their Eee PC 900 with a 15% smaller capacity battery than was shipped with the Eee PC 701.

In the worst case, a video playback test, the Eee PC 900 was returning under 1 hour with the 4400mah battery which I find a little too low. In fact, if you look closely at the differences between the 4400 and 5200mah results, there’s more like a 30% capacity difference than 15%. I suspect that their 4400mah battery was a little worn. Either that or the real capacity of the battery is even less than 4400mah. The other possibility is that the 4400mah battery is dropping below the power-down level far sooner than the 5200mah battery which looks to be returning results just as expected. 2.5-3hrs isn’t bad at all for an office test but look at how much difference a web-session makes. It’s a result of the Wifi radio and rich web pages that do that. Web surfing is a CPU-heavy operation these days. [Thoughts about Atom after the break…]

Wibrain and Terratec in 120kmh UMPC TV test

I surprised myself yesterday morning when I managed to get live digital TV working at 120kmh. I had heard reports that the dual-tuner DVB sticks in ‘diversity’ mode were good but never expected it to be this easy to get live TV working in the car.

I was using a Terratec dual-tuner diversity DVB-T USB stick connected to a Wibrain B1H UMPC for this test. DVB-T is an over-the-air (terrestrial) digital TV standard that is common in Europe (not in the U.S) and without any real testing of antenna positioning inside the car was able to get a smooth signal at all city speeds. On the autobahn I was up to about 80kmh when it started to drop out but by moving one of the antenna I was getting a good signal at 120kmh. Of course, reception quality depends on where you are in relation to the transmission tower but even so, I didn’t exactly do much to optimise the antenna positions and I dare say that I could have got things working even more smoothly if I’d have tested out a few more positions. For under 100 Euro, this is a great way to add TV to the car if you already have a CarPC, UMPC or Laptop. Taxi and mini-bus drivers take note! More notes and a video after the pic…

MSI Wind spotted for online ordering.

EeePCnews.de reports the first sighting of the MSI Wind U100 online. The specs match up with what was given in the MSI press release and the price shown is 406 Euro. Expansys also have an MSI Wind page up (aff.) now but there’s no real information available on delivery dates apart from  an expected date of June. I personally doubt it will be in peoples hands in June but a launch at Computex in Taipei is likely. These online ads are often just there to pull in early enquiries , to get Google positioning and to attract links from articles like this!

I’m quite interested in one of these mini laptops as a partner device for a MID but I don’t want a Diamondville-based one. I know that the 3D graphics power is going to be better but I’d much rather have a 1.8Ghz Silverthorne-based one with the Poulsbo chipset. It will be cooler, quieter and could return a much more impressive battery life. Clevo told us at CeBIT that 7-hours could be possible with a 4-cell battery configuration. To me, 7-hours autonomy is worth a lot more than a 3D graphics score and a $100 price saving but we’ll have to wait a little bit longer to see if it’s really possible.

For some information about the differences between the Diamondville and Silverthorne platforms, see this post.

Source: EeePCNews.de

More info and links for the MSI Wind. MSI Wind is currently the 3rd most viewed product in the product database.

Mobile TV and the MID opportunity.

Two things happened today to make me want to write something about mobile TV. Firstly, I was testing the WiBrain with a Terratec DVB USB stick in the car this morning. It was a an interesting and largely successful test of a digital TV standard that wasn’t designed to be mobile. I’ll write more about my 130km/h testing later but for now, lets take a look at a New York Times article that highlights the growing trend of mobile TV in Europe.

[continues after the break…]

Flipstart are re-positioning.

I just wanted to clear up a story that appeared on Engadget this morning. Yes, Flipstart are retreating from the UMPC market. I heard from a contact back in Jan that the Flipstart UMPC production was going to be reduced, sales and support handed over to Dynamism and that Flipstart were going to re-focus on MIDs and smartphones.

Based on the current pressure in the mininote market, it’s probably not a bad move for a small company.

16GB iPod Touch on woot today for $289

Apple may not refer to the iPod Touch as a MID, but it surely fits the definition, and is one of the best currently on the market. Today only, through the famous deal-a-day site Woot.com , you can pick up a refurbished 16GB iPod Touch for $289 (sorry, they only ship to the US). For the sake of price comparison, a new 16GB iPod Touch will run you $399, while a refurbished 16GB will cost you $329 direct from Apple. I’m not quite sure if the iPod being sold on Woot includes the January update, so be aware, Apple may charge you an optional $20 for the January iPod/iPhone software update. I would check the comments on today’s Woot to find out for sure.

Homebrew controller makes UMPC gaming more practical

Danmiddle2 over at the Micropctalk.com forums has come up with a very clever controller solution for making mobile gaming on his VAIO UX more practical. Using a “Genius MaxFire Pandora Pro Foldable Mini USB Gamepad for PC”, Dan connected the two halves of the USB controller back to back. He then mounted the connected pieces to a dummy CF card (pictured here), using the CF slot as the mechanism in which to secure the controller. The controller then conveniently plugs into the USB slot right above the CF card slot. As you can see in the video below, Dan is able to play Unreal Tournament 2004 very effectively, using the front face of the controller to move his character, the back to shoot and jump, and the mouse pad on the UX to aim. Very ingenious! Head over to the original thread for more details.

Origami 2.0 coming soon, preview on the HTC Shift

Jenn from Pocketables.net got to preview Origami 2.0 while playing with her new HTC Shift. The Shift is the first UMPC to ship with Origami 2.0, which is otherwise not released to the public at this point. If you will recall, the first Origami was essentially an application launcher and media manager designed to be finger optimized for small first-gen UMPC screens. It was met with a mixed reaction, some people enjoyed the interface while others found it useless. Back in January, the Origami Project blog announced Origami 2.0, which aims to increase functionality and usability by adding additional applets and features. Most notable are the web browser, feed reader, Picture Password, and context sensitive information page (weather, traffic etc.) all designed to be finger friendly.

Just a few days ago, the Origami Project blog announced that they were working on a final download package, and Origami 2.0, or OX2 as they are calling it, will be released “very soon”. If you can’t wait, be sure to head over to Pocketables.net to check out Jenn’s experience with Origami 2.0. One thing that looks interesting about Origami 2.0 is that if will provide you with different information depending on the time of day, and your location. It would be great to wake up in the morning and have your UMPC know that you want to see the weather and traffic before you leave for work!

T-Mobile U.S. 3G Data available. Don’t forget the spare battery!

Coming to you live on 1700Mhz, its UMTS data at 356kbps. on the T-Mobile network.

As far as I’m concerned, UMTS speeds aren’t bad for browsing and email which keeps 99% of users happy for 99% of the time. The problem is when you want to download a big file or, even worse, upload something. In that case you’re down to analogue modem speeds which isn’t much fun at all, especially when its an important document. Don’t forget that 3G data transmissions take a huge amount of power though. In my tests I see something like 100% higher battery load when doing continuous 3G data transmissions compared to data over the GPRS/GSM network here in Europe. Continuous use of Voip, instant messaging and other always-on app’s will kill your battery faster than you could ever imagine. 1-hour battery life isn’t much fun which, bizarrely enough, is why I tend to use a UMPC for mobile Internet operations. In these ‘always on’ conditions, the UMPC battery life far outlives that of my ‘2-day standby’ mobile phone. [Related article]

Maybe those of you in the U.S. with some background info would care to fill me in on why T-Mobile appear to be 3 years behind AT&T in their 3G data rollout and eons behind European rollouts. Vodafone Germany, homeland of T-Mobile, are promising a 28/2mbps rollout in 2009 which is just insanely fast for a wireless local loop. Fingers crossed that the back-hauls are in place otherwise we’ll all be meeting at a bottleneck somewhere in the base station. It reminds me of my network planing days with ISP’s; the bandwidth and financial calculations for business-grade Internet access products only worked if the contention ratio was over 30:1. For consumers, the contention ratio was embarrassing and I’m sure it’s no better now.

Via IntoMobile. User reports at Howard Forums.