Yes, we were unlucky and got a faulty Tega V2 so Tegatech kindly shipped over a new one for us to play with. Work starts on that soon but in the meantime, what should we do with the faulty one? We hinted at a little nakedness to Tegatech and they agreed, so here it is.

The metal back is tough as nuts and there should be no problem doing some mods with it as long as there is space underneath. The surface is so smooth though that you could probably stick a mount onto it. Removing the rubber stoppers and screws was a piece of cake and prising apart the back equally as simple. Revealed!

A 3-cell 34Wh Li-poly battery dominates the layout and you’ll see that there’s very little plastic around it. Removable batteries need to adhere to a lot of regulations about puncture resistance which means that they end up being fat. Internal batteries can be a lot thinner. To the right of the battery pack are 3 important module areas.

At the top you’ve got a half-size PCIe-Mini used for the WiFI/BT module (a 3DSP B/G adaptor that is connected via the USB channel on the PCIe-Mini slot) Underneath that, you’ve got a full size PCIe-Mini slot that is used for the 3G module on the 3G versions (a Huawei EM770.)  Underneath that is the SSD module with a SATA connector but JKKMobile tells me it is not a common size so you can’t easily find fast aftermarket SSDs to swap-in. Here are the detail of the SSD…

So where’s the memory? It’s under the motherboard on the right side. It’s not simple to get to but certainly possible.

More pics (at full size) are available in the gallery.

It’s been a long time coming, but someone finally managed to throw some 3G into their Sony Vaio UX UMPC [

User Oginger1 of MicroPCTalk has managed to put a Huawei E169G USB 3G Modem inside of his UX for internal 3G goodness. The US versions of the Vaio UX come with a built in EDGE modem, but Sony never refreshed the line with a 3G capable model. Oginger1 wasn’t even able to use the slow EDGE connection as he owns an international model (UX50) that comes with a CF slot instead of an EDGE module. He documented the process and gave a rough guide of how to do the mod (definitely not for newbies). To understand just how small the modable space inside the UX is, you should note that he had to cut out one of the back hand grips and raise it up 2mm, then epoxy it back into place to be able to squeeze the unit inside. Head over to his thread to see the whole process.