According to my stats, 5.77% of vists to the UMPCPortal are from people with screen sizes of 1024×600, 800×480 or 800×600. Those screen sizes are almost exclusive to the UMPC (MID, pro-mobile, netbook) class of devices so its got be close to a 1:1 relationship.

I wonder if that same 5.77% statistic will appear if I put a poll here.

Look at the growth of the 1024×600 screens. Its not just cross-sector growth either. The 800×480 graph isn’t going anywhere!

The product pages have been updated again this weekend to include more info and community features allowing you to research even more detail from one central point. Some of the features have been worked in over the last month and today I finished another feature – User Submitted Links. You’ll see it on the top-right of each product page. This will help other people get the word out on new product-related content. Feel free to submit your own product-specific website, blog, news tip, a review link or how-to, details of a special offer, a reseller page, a link to an accessory or anything else you think that the owners and potential owners would benefit from. We’ll get a notification as soon as you submit the link and will check it out as soon as we can. If it’s a good one, we’ll add it to the database and it will appear on the product page, on partner sites JKKMobile and Liliputing and in the river of links. (RSS)

Other features that have been added to increase community participation, usability and content:

• Product comments. Each product page now has a comments section at the bottom where you can quickly and easily enter your observations, thoughts and owner feedback for others to benefit from. You may put questions in here but in general, questions get answered in more depth if put into the forums. The comments are hosted by Disqus and include RSS feeds that you can subscribe to on Disqus’ UMPCPortal page.
• Related products. Up to 10 related products are shown in order of popularity. Products are chosen based on the form factor and screen size. Information on weight is also shown. Simply click the images to learn about popular related products.
• News and related links. This has been expanded to ten items and includes an RSS feed where you can track the latest links as they are entered into the database. This is where the user submitted links are also shown.
• Latest Forum posts. We’ve broken out sub-forums on UMPCPortal for some of the devices and if that;s the case, the product page will show the latest forum posts. An RSS feed is available for each forum.
• Trends. I’ve added a trending graph which shows the products relative popularity (calculated and compared with the most popular product on each day.) Its interesting to see how a devices popularity levels out after the initial news buzz.

With over 100,000 people visiting information on the 200+ plus products every month I think we’re reaching a point where community input can really help to build up quality information very quickly which will help people make buying decisions, solve their problems and answer their questions. Its amazing to think that when the list started about 2.5 years ago, it was literally just a list of 18 device names!

I’m always adding to my (HUGE) to-do list and am happy to have external input on features you might want to see on the product pages. One of the things I’ll work on soon is an email update feature where you will be emailed details as they change on each page. The second feature is ‘tags.’ You’ll be able to tag devices with keywords and eventually it will allow you to group and search for special features. Talking about search, this is another thing I want to improve so that you can, for example, find all devices with HSDPA easily. For the time being though enjoy the new features and please, let me know if you find any bugs!

No, its’s not another new member, its just me wanting to say an official ‘welcome’ to Thorsten, (AKA The_Niles) and Ben (AKA Benz145) and to mention the other team members that are working with me at the moment.

Andre (Lyser) and Sascha, who joined us on the podcast last week, are going to be taking a look at UMPCPortal.de over the next few weeks to try and get that going for our German-speaking guests. Pdiddy is still working hard in the forums and Elliot (Arielviews007) is doing all sorts of stuff around the site. Of course, we shouldn’t forget the old-timer, Kornel who’s stock is rising right now!

I should also give a shout out to those who tip me, highlight my errors and notify me of spam and other site issues. You are just as much a part of the team as anyone else as are people like Ctitanic, Mikey and TSO; Consistent and valued forums members that have all posted over 500 items in the forum. Hat-tip to you guys and everyone else that gives feedback and keeps the site alive.

Have a great weekend everyone – Chippy.

There have been a lot of changes on UMPCPortal in the last few weeks. The migration to the WordPress blog is the most visual of these but perhaps more important in the long run are the addition of new team members. You might have spotted that some of the recent news items have not been made by either Steve or Kornel. As newcomers let’s introduce ourselves.

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This feels like a breath of fresh air for me. I hope it feels the same for you. For the last 18 months I’ve been using a Xoops content management system for UMPCPortal news and to be honest, it’s been a pain in the backside. I’ve never been able to open comments up to the public, the management system was slow, the RSS feeds were always 30 minutes behind, the real time stats were almost non-existent, metaweblog posting support was limited, third party plugins always felt a little risky, trackback support was missing, SEO optimisation was poor and the design was always very difficult to modify. Hopefully, all of that changes from today (although I have left some patience in reserve for the probably teething issues) as over the last 24 hours I’ve installed wordpress.org, written a new template and imported the 2000+ posts from Origamiportal, UMPCPortal and Carrypad and finally, just a few minutes ago, switched over to the new system.

I hope you find the layout easier to use and the commenting system better as there is now support for unregistered users which should really open up the conversation nicely.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the old comments to work in the new database so I’ve abandoned them and left them on the old versions of the post which are all still live in the background. In fact the old system is still running in the background until I’m happy that everything is stable. I will try again to import the comments before I turn off the old system.

Other parts of the site remain the same. The forum is still there, the gallery and of course, the product database too but if you see something missing, please let me know. Please!