I’ve had unconfirmed and insider reports for months now that Wibrain (or rather NeoSolar, the owners) had sold the WIbrain operation to China-based E-King. The E-King website has been up for a while but it now looks like they’ve gone into production and are starting to sell the E-King i1 UMPC. That pretty much confirms all the rumors!
Two UMPCPortal readers have taken the plunge and bought one on Ebay. User ‘hansonweb’ has already received it and started to feed-back first impressions.
“It comes with 60gb hdd, z520 processor, 1gb memory. XP pre-installed…It came with a DVD with drivers. Hdd has two partitions, 20gb and 40gb. 40gb seems to have a restore image.
I like it so far. The only problem I have is it does not come with a vga or video adaptor. Their dm sheet says that it comes with a MicroSD, but it is actually a standard SD card slot.”
The i1 is certainly a great device [my review] and at 504 Euros including delivery, the Ebay-cost (non 3G version) isn’t bad but do watch out for support issues when buying from Ebay. Returns can be costly and take a long time.
I spoke with Mobilx this morning about the i1 and we couldn’t really come to a decision about whether importing it would be commercially viable. On one hand its a fantastically productive little UMPC but there’s obviously some risk where support is concerned. E-King is also unknown as far as build-quality goes. We could certainly try to put a group order together if people are ready to go forward with a purchase though. Let us know in the comments below and if there’s a lot of interest i’ll give Mobilx a call.
