It has been a while since we’ve seen anything about the Nova Side Arm 2, but I have some info on the rugged business oriented UMPC. We already got the basic spec rundown of the Side Arm 2:

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  • 800 x 480 7″ palm rejection touch screen
  • Intel Atom 1.1 GHz Z510 with US15W chipset
  • 1GB/2GB of RAM
  • 4GB disk on module, Micro SD card
  • 8GB/16GB/32GB DOM solid state storage optional per slot (2 slots)
  • 60/120GB HDD or 32/64GB SSD
  • PC express card
  • 2 USB 2.0 ports
  • SD card slot
  • GPS
  • 802.11 a/b/g
  • Bluetooth V2.0
  • 3G (optional)
  • Up to 10 hours battery life

Specs are nice, but here we can see the true nature of this device which is meant to be highly modular and be compatible with lots of different work applications. (click to enlarge)

Check out all of those configuration options. You could potentially load the Side Arm 2 up with 134GB of SSD storage and 120GB of HDD storage right out of the box. Normally I would curse a company for putting a memory card slot under a battery, but they took some time to think about it, and solved the issue by making the battery plug in, allowing it to move and uncover the Micro SD card slot and SIM slot without having to power down the computer.

The SA2 seen here, has a different keyboard configuration than some of the other shots that we’ve seen of the device. Nova says that this will be touch-typeable (2 hands instead of thumbs), which would be great, but I’m not sure how easy it will be given the size of the device.

It is nice to see a UMPC in the recent sea of netbooks. UMPCPortal forum user SlickRick has come across the NOVA Side Arm 2 (Chippy jokes in his mini blog, “…not ARM based!”), a new UMPC which easily reminds me of the Panasonic CF-U1. It looks thinner than the CF-U1 but I still wouldn’t call it pretty; it is certainly an industry machine rather than consumer, which makes it odd that some of their photos have a high-school-age girl showing off the product. The keyboard actually looks pretty nice, as long as your thumbs can cover the whole thing. Check out the full specs page, the important stuff is below:

• 800 x 480 7″ palm rejection touch screen
• Intel Atom 1.1 GHz Z510 with US15W chipset
• 1GB/2GB of RAM
• 4GB disk on module, Micro SD card
• 8GB/16GB/32GB DOM solid state storage optional per slot (2 slots)
• 60/120GB HDD or 32/64GB SSD
• PC express card
• 2 USB 2.0 ports
• SD card slot
• GPS
• 802.11 a/b/g
• Bluetooth V2.0
• 3G (optional)
• Up to 10 hours battery life

I can’t say the 800×480 resolution is very thrilling, but for an industry computer with lots of proprietary software I guess it isn’t that big of a deal. The rest of the specs look pretty good, especially 10 hours of battery life, but this may be with a secondary battery attachment, as it sounds like this will be a module oriented UMPC. With integrated GPS and 3G this could be a great geocaching device.

[jkkmobile]