The ASUS EeePC 1215b might be outside the 10” and 1KG limit we generally apply on UMPCPortal but there’s a few things to note. 1 – This could be one of the lightest, and cheapest devices you could use for mobile 720p video editing and 2 – The technology could filter into high-end, if quite large, UMPCs.

I didn’t get a chance to do a Crystalmark test for a quick overview of the system performance but I did check out the Windows performance score. The CPU is the lowest of the scores, pegging the index at 3.8

Gallery here.

Available with the C-30 or C-50 AMD Fusion platform this is the Eee PC 1015B.

Max 2GB RAM breaks the mould a bit and we suspect this could come with Windows 7 OS options unlike many 10″ Netbooks

Posted from WordPress for Android with the Galaxy Tab

ECS, an ODM who designs products for others to brand and market have interesting 10″ and 7″ Oaktrail products here among the dust on day 0 at CEBIT.

800gm for the 10 Tablet feels quite nice. Availability (for ECS customers) is planned for April. Here are some pics and specs. We’re back for some video-time tomorrow.

Posted from WordPress for Android with the Galaxy Tab

CeBIT is a very traditional, business-like show. Suits dominate and after-show parties are few and far between. Companies like Microsoft often present purely business-focused products and strategies and if you’re expecting another huge pile of consumer tablets, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

For readers of UMPCPortal, our pro-level site (that has, I admit, been pretty dry on news lately) it’s good news because products like the Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 get a chance to shine.

We’ve got the full, official specs in the database now and wow, this is not your average tablet PC.

 Full specifications, links etc. Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 TabletPC

A 400-nit screen IPS screen, 2GB RAM, remote security, capacitive/digitiser input, fast-charge, removable battery options, 4 USB ports, Gobi 3G option, SSD, docking port and an array mic are just some of the advanced features you’ll find which indicated a pro-level, industry focused solution. It also gives you clues to the price.

The price isn’t available right now but the Q550 has already launched in Japan with a availability stated as March/April. A CeBIT launch is also planned and we hope to get a pricing indicator next week. A guess around the 1000 Euro mark for entry-level configuration is probably not far off.

All images in the gallery.

Note that there’s a lot of talk about 8 hours battery life but a Fujitsu sales site in Japan makes it clear that this is with the extended battery (38wh) in a JEITA (largely idle) test. Take 30% off that for real world figures. With the standard battery, a 19wh unit, you’re looking at 3.5hrs max. That isn’t going to impress many but at under 900gm for a 10” PC, it’s good.

We hope to get some good testing time in with the Q550 and bring you information on graphics, SSD speed and more battery life thoughts.

Hat-Tip: Gottabemobile

In this video from Webciety, at CeBIT Sascha Pallenberg (Netbooknews, Meetmobility), Joanna Stern (Engadget), JKK (JKKMobile,MeetMobility), Carmen S. Villadar (What’s Up Android) and Arno Glompner (Blackberry) talk about the Challenges of Mobile Work. Unfortunately I had to sit in the studio so couldn’t make the panel but next year, I’ll at least be in the audience to heckle!

Two important points I picked up from the Video:

• Home and work life is now interleaved. That’s clear right? There’s no 9-5 for many people any more and even if there is, there are private things that get slotted into 30-second breaks in every work day.
• The cloud is not mobile. This is something that many people forget. The cloud is great. Mobility is great but the two rarely go together seamlessly. This is extremely important.

If I had just 30 second on this panel I would have brought up the following point:

The biggest challenge for future mobile internet users will be the choice of scaling down the desktop environment for mobile use or scaling up the mobile environment for desktop use. There has been a huge shift in the last two years. The mobile web didn’t really take off as new phones proved it was OK to browser full-fat websites but because of sensors and applications and time-slicing, there is now a mobile web world that you can not re-create on the desktop.

I’ll be updating my 2007 ‘What’s the FIE’ article to reflect this very soon.

CeBIT is a little different for me this year as I’m staying home on ‘baby alert.’ Assuming my wife doesn’t go into labor early I’m going to make the most of it by taking the opportunity to get some good overview coverage going.  I’ll be working in the studio covering news as it comes in and then, every two hours I’ll be pulling together a 10 minute update for  MeetMobility. The MeetMobility team  are already on the ground in Hanover, we’ve tested all the equipment and we’re ready to go. More information on our live sessions at MeetMobility…

MeetMobility Is Mobile at CeBIT. Live in the Studio. | Meet:Mobility.

I hope you enjoy the coverage and I look forward to chatting with you in the chat channel.

Welcome to this week’s netbook roundup. In this space every Monday I’ll highlight netbook news items that might not need their own individual posts but may still be interesting.

• Dell Mini 10 Unboxed, Compared to HP Mini 1000 – A nice unboxing of the Dell Mini 10 [Portal page], and comparison to the HP Mini 1000. I still haven’t gotten my hands on a Mini 10 so this video was quite appetizing.

• Gigabyte Promotional Videos for Upcoming Netbooks – Liliputing points out three videos released by Gigabyte on YouTube which promote their upcoming netbooks.

• Rumor: Verizon and HP Readying Subsidized Netbooks – Cheap netbooks due to subsidizes from cell phone carriers are fairly common outside the US, but it seems like HP might be teaming up with Verizon to offer a discount on a netbook if the consumer wants to start a Verizon contract. If this comes to fruition, we’ll probably see a USB WWAN card offered with the netbook, but I think most of us are hoping for a more elegant internal solution.

• How to: Touch to Eee PC 1000HE – Jkk points us to a video tutorial that shows you how to add a touchscreen to the Eee PC 1000HE [Portal page].

• Asus Eee PC T101H at CeBIT 2009 – A late CeBIT video from Jkk. Jkk gives us the run down on the tablet-netbook, Eee PC T101H [Portal page].

I’ve uploaded the ‘best of’ my CeBIT photos to Flickr. A slideshow is embedded below but you can also see them here.

Update: It looks like we got the model name wrong. It says S32 on the product info sticker underneath the device!

Kohjinsha weren’t present at CeBIT but we found a few of their products on the Taiwan Excellence stand. The SX3 was there (Sascha and JKK have a video of that that they will post soon) but I took the time to take a closer look at the SC32 having heard that the pricing has been slashed and that a 3G version is now available in the UK. You can see in the video how Kohjinsha have implemented the 3G module. After we did this video we popped off the battery but couldn’t see a SIM card slot so I can’t guarantee that this is how it’s happening with the KJS-UK version. Looking at their spec sheet (PDF) it shows images of a removable 3G card so it could be the same. We’ve got a query out with KJS-UK to confirm this.

With the built-in 3G module and rotating screen, this could make an interesting car navigation device or photographers tool (great screen, geo-tagging with the GPS, good storage, fast SD slot) but with just 2hrs battery life (standard battery) its difficult to use it as a long-term mobile device.

More details, along with our review and images are available on the
SC3 information page.

Everything is packed, I’m on the train, connected and in contact with team ‘MeetMobility’ (JKK and Sascha) for the start of our CeBIT 2009 coverage. This year we’re sponsored by our friends from Mobilx.eu so make sure you check out their website (i’m expecting them to put up prices for the Viliv S5 and UMID M1 very soon) while you’re waiting for the next post. You can also check out the latest ‘micro’ blogs which will fill you in on what’s going on in the background. Check out the center column on the front page for more information on the twitter accounts to follow and see my latest updates

As we mentioned in our Meet Mobility podcast on Saturday, the hype doesn’t feel as big as it was in previous years but we definitely have enough to cover. Asus Eee PC T91 and Viliv UMPCs are at the top of my list but there’s plenty more on the list too.

Saschas Taiwan highlights: (some in German)

• Eee PC T91
• Acer Aspire One D150 and ‘Slim’
• Eee PC 1000HE (Chicklet keyboard)
• Gigabyte M528
• Gigabyte. 10″ devices. Interesting slim netbook.
• Samsung. MID. NC20, NC10. VIA Nano UMPC.
• ASUS. T101.
• MSI. Slim netbooks.
• Intel Pavillion
• Viliv S5, S7, X70

I’ll also be keeping a close eye on the ‘midphone’ segment too. Big, slider-style WVGA smartphones is definately a trend we saw at MWC and I hope it continues.

We expect to hit the showground by 3pm for a snoop round. Intel have a booth tour shortly after that so there’ll be a good chance to see what they’ve got set up in their MID wall. Thanks for watching and enjoy the show.

Life has been so busy over the last month that I’ve hardly had a chance to think about CeBIT and yet it starts in just 5 days. On Monday, I’ll be meeting JKK and Sacha in Hannover and we’re going to hit CeBIT as hard as we can.

Fortunately the accommodation, tickets (I have a press pass again this year) and transport have all been arranged so all that remains to do is fix up the schedule, write up a hit-list and organise the kit.

I’ll write about the ‘hit list’ in the next few days as we’ll probably use it for the basis of a warm-up podcast tentatively planned for Friday but let me quickly talk about the kit I’m going to use at CeBIT.

Due to three ‘smoked’ UMPCs, a couple of no-show UMPCs and a general need to keep spending down this year, I’m having to really cobble together the best I can from the devices I have left here. I’m not exactly struggling to find a PC to take but I had planned a different set of devices and was planning to have a bit more of a ‘showcase’ setup.

I will go with the three-device strategy (phone, mid, notebook) because of flexibility, fall-back and battery life. I’ll take my Nokia N82 for the important tasks of voice, SMS and email and it will also come in handy for some direct-to-flickr photo shooting due to it’s superb camera optics and flash. I might use it for a bit of Google Latitude fun and the occasional 3G Bluetooth modem but the idea is really to preserve it for essential comms. At the top end of the range i’ll be taking my laptop. Actually it’s a Medion Akoya Mini netbook but I don’t have anything else so it’s going to serve as my main keyboard and screen during the event. It’s far from the perfect mobile netbook though and I’ll have to deal with a lack of built-in 3G, no Bluetooth and a poor 2hr battery life. On the positive side, I’ve used it a lot and it’s got a stable build with all my applications running well.

As the third device, I want to take a MID. The original plan was to use an Aigo P8888 but the standard 2hr battery life and lack of standard XP build has put me off buying one. I’m not a JKK and so hacking XPe and piggyback batteries was never on the cards. The Viliv S5 didn’t hit the market on time. The Wibrain i1 prototype doesn’t standby or hibernate due to an incomplete BIOS setup and I’ve killed the Raon Everun Note I was preparing. As I look across my devices for a MID, the only one I can see is the Nokia N810, a device that I had ignored for the best part of a year but started using again recently when I upgraded the OS and installed a bunch of community applications on it. As an RSS, mobile website, IM and twitter tool, it’s working out quite well. Web browsing is frustratingly slow but certainly better than my S60 device and with 4 hours wifi-on battery life, it can sit and pick up feeds and tweets for a long time before the battery needs changing so today I bought a second battery and a USB charger cable for it, fished out an old Nokia 3G phone with a broken backlight and will tether the two up on a 2.50-Euro per day pay-as-you-go UMTS contract, drop the phone in my bag or on my belt and put the N810 in my pocket as and use it as as always-on ‘informer’ and twitter tool. I’ll also be able to put comments on photo’s at Flickr and post to the blog using the Flickr blog posting tools as Jenn did at CES. The N810 needs a lot more power to turn it into a real MID but the size, battery life, screen and keyboard should help to keep me updated on the go and certainly won’t need much space.

One thing I’m really happy about is that I’ll only need one power brick for all the kit and the reason for that is a nice little U2o power pack I’ve got from Ultimate-Netbook.co.uk. I did some field testing for them last year and we’ve been happy with the results so they now sell it. Fortunately they let me keep it after the testing so I’m now armed with a 55wh power pack that takes a 19v input (the power brick from the Medion Akoya plugs straight in) and provides 5V (via USB), 9v, 16v and 19v outputs. There’s a selection of adaptors with the device so both my phone, the N810 and the Medion Akoya will run or charge from it. If I treat the Akoya well, I’ll get about 6hrs working time out of it which should be fine for a day’s work on the floor.

For photo and video work I’ll be taking my trust Canon S2IS and tripod. The long lens, VGA video capability and great stereo mics are perfect for recording conferences or device overviews and although a DSLR with 720P video recording would be my preference, it won’t be hard to get some good results out of the S2. Besides, JKK has a new Canon HD cam so we’ll be using that for most of our videos.

Finally, I’ll take the Samson USB mic which is great for mobile podcasting and interviews. Audacity is installed on the netbook and it’s an easy process to upload an MP3 to UMPCPortal.

I’m a little sad there’s no UMPC in there but it’s a proven set of kit that I’m very familiar with and that should help to keep the stress levels down. The whole kit comes in at 4kg which is very good considering I’ve got the tripod, cam and a 400gm microphone included in that. Total cost of the complete kit is around 1400 Euros (new)

Of course, if I have any issues, I won’t need to look too far for help. Sascha the ‘netbook king’ is joining us in the accommodation and on the floor and he’ll be bringing a stack of netbooks so I’ll probably get some good hands-on opportunities with some of the netbooks I haven’t had a chance to use yet. JKK is with us too and he has a good set of kit too so between us, well have no excuses.

As JKK, Sascha and I prepare over the next few days you’ll probably here a few more warm-up stories. We’ve tentatively planned a podcast for Friday evening so expect a CeBIT warm-up post over the weekend.

Could there be a clearer indicator that a mobile, Internet-connected, cloud-centric, all-day device is what everyone is expecting?

About 300 Journalists attending a press conference in January chose their top themes for CeBIT 2009 and here’s how the results came out. (2008 figures in brackets)

Platz 1     GreenIT                    29,9%      (24,4%)
Platz 2     mobiles Internet           18,2%      (18,6%)
Platz 3     Netbooks (Mini-Notebooks)  11,7%      (10,6%)
Platz 4     Energieeffizienz            9,1%      ( - )
Platz 5     Cloud Computing             7,8%      ( - ) 

Given ‘mobility’ and ‘energy efficiency’ and ‘Could computing’ all contribute towards a green theme you could probably just remove it and concentrate on the other 4 and sum it up by saying ‘mobile Internet device.’

The question is, what form of device? The Uber-smartphone? The classic Intel MID or the Netbook? Considering that smartphones are evolving into computing-capable MIDs anyway, lets just call it MIDs and Netbooks. Even simpler, lets just call it the ‘UMPC space.’

Source: Presseportal.de. Via Mobile Zeitgeist.

As I come towards the end of the loan period for the Wibrain i1 HSDPA and Compal MID (Thanks Mobilx. Thanks Intel) it’s time to start thinking about what device(s) should replace them. The i1 has been extremely productive and enjoyable and the battery life was the best that I’ve ever experienced without using an extended battery. It will be hard, if not impossible with the devices on the market today, to replace it. The Compal Jax10 (3G) was the best browsing experience I’ve ever had in my pocket so that’s going to be tough to match too.

For the time being I’m not going to buy anything new and there’s two reasons for that. Number one is cash. There isn’t a lot in the UMPCPortal pot at the moment and with CeBIT just a month away, I need keep money locked-up for that. The second problem is knowing about devices that are coming up. Viliv S5, UMID M1 and the new Nokia Tablet are three devices that I really must know more about before I buy something and that information just isn’t available at the moment. I know many of you are in the same position. Frustrating isn’t it!

Read the full story

Before it gets too late and CES becomes a distant memory, I wanted to thank all the bloggers that were out in CES providing detailed news, images and videos for the rest of the world to see and enjoy. You kept us busy for many many hours here at UMPCPortal (I’m still not able to sleep in my local timezone yet!) and it was almost impossible to keep up with all the content at times.

Special thanks goes to Sascha Pallenberg, Jenn Lee and Kevin Tofel who all called in for quick podcast recordings, to Brad for some great netbook coverage and Gottabemobile for their usual high standards of reporting. Engadget did a fantastic job.  Also thanks to Lora Heiny who organised the tablet and touch meeting which many of us enjoyed live over Ustream. Finally, thanks to the 850 people that dropped into the live session over the four days where JKK and I did a scary 45 hours of live streaming. The feedback in the chat room was amazing and definitely helped us to keep track of that latest and best news items coming out of Vegas. Star Member award goes to ‘EC’ who spotted the VIA Nano-based Samsung Q1EX and even called in from the floor. We owe you EC!

You can find all the CES podcasts in the RSS feed and, currently, on the front-center column on the homepage. We’ll be going live soon for a roundup podcast, probably on Friday evening here. Follow twitter for latest announcements about that.

JKK, Sascha and I, the three Mobiteers, have already booked an apartment in Hannover for CeBIT 2009 starting on March 02. Hopefully we can repay some of the hard work done by those now suffering with colds, blisters and lack of sleep!