Roughly translated, that means nice legs, shame about the face. (boat race=face. Cockney rhyming slang me ole china.)

Azentek have taken an Amtek T770 (my hands-on review, video here) and given it some nice legs. A car headrest mount to be precise. Something I wouldn’t mind having myself for the odd family journey. The problem is that they’ve plastered a rather nasty looking brand name on the front. Tut tut. They style police will be after you Azentek. Only huge huge brands with huge huge followings can get away with that. The worst thing is that they’ve decided to call it the AxSS! That’s nearly as bad as the SA1-F00KS.

Excuse my flippancy. I’ve just got up and its 0520! More info on the Azentek over at GottaBeMobile. Specifications in the product portal.

I’ll be honest up front. I don’t like the Flipstart UMPC. I haven’t used one yet so I could be wrong but the combination of that keyboard, the big battery and high-end price don’t get me going like other UMPCs do. Having said that, this version (I assume its using the same core design) does get me a bit more interested. The Go-Book MR-1 looks a whole lot better and with my record of breaking UMPCs, this is one I should think carefully about!

The Go-Book comes with a mil-spec price too!

PCMag via Gizmodo.

I’m not sure if this is going to be a marriage made in heaven. A digitizer-loving tabletPC expert has got hold of a Q1 Ultra over at GottaBeMobile and is talking about vectoring already! Hey Dennis, get your consumer UMPC-head on man ;-)

Fortunately, I, and many others, know that Dennis is going to do a pretty good job at reviewing the Q1 Ultra so I’m pleased, if a little jealous as my Q1 Ultra isn’t due until next week, that he’s one of the first people to get hold of it. We’ve seen user reports already but it will be nice to hear the opinion of someone that’s handled a few UMPCs in the past (he’s also a Q1P owner) and it will be nice to see a hand-on video.

Questions from me, Dennis, are:

• Battery life figures. What does Notebook Hardware Control say? Minimum and average figures please.
• Can you do normal browsing successfully on the max battery setting?
• The mouse pointer, its not really is it? When I tried it it felt like something like an 8-way 3-speed joystick. Certainly not a synaptics device with pressure sensitive touch.
• Screen brightness. Outdoor useable? Compared to the Q1P?
• What happens to performance when you optimise Vista. I assume its a slug at the moment.
• Fancy installing XP to see how different the experience, battery life and performance is?

Q1 Ultra Specifications.

Misleading title alert! Its not actually ‘our’ man. Christoph is Assistant manager of Epiacenter.com and is working part-time for UMPCPortal while he’s out there. ‘Groundbreaking’ isn’t my choice of words either. Its from Richard Brown, senior marketing manager from VIA.

I can say with confidence that we are going to make some ground-breaking announcements

All I can say with confidence at the moment is I’m not going to get much sleep over the next three days. I love expo-time!

Christoph has his first video up already. An intro to Taipei (on YouTube here.) Unfortunately, no UMPCs to be seen yet!

The end-of-life Fujitsu P1510d, a well-loved convertible 8.9″ notebook appears to be re-surfacing at Computex. A California-based company called Dreamnovia have taken the P1510, given it a paint-job and are promoting it as the Dreambook.

Specifications appear to be unchanged from the P1510 but the pricing seems to have gone up! $2000 for a 256MB/30G device running XP Tablet Edition isn’t going to impress too many people. I guess they’re intending to hit a high-end style-oriented customer but the quality of the website and photography certainly doesn’t reflect the term ‘high-end.’

Despite the terrible weather forecast (rain, clouds, heat, thunder) It’s time to finalize the pack-list and buy the last items, prepare the solar equipment (which should turn up today) and do some test loading and test cycling. Over the last weekend I fitted the baggage to the bike and loaded it up with random heavy items including the new tent, sleeping bag etc. There should be no problem with space or loading weight. I also tested out the tent and it seems OK although some dampness came through from the floor. Is […]

I’ve been waiting for Neil Balthaser to post this. Its a multi-part review of the OQO Model 02 and its an extremely good read.

Neil is a pen computing fan and goes into good detail about why the OQO’s flat screen makes it ideal for handwriting. He talks about ergonomics, heat and noise and makes comparisons with the Q1P (which he also owns so he’s no stranger to UMPCs)

The OQO’s form factor is ideal for my needs. It is small enough to carry around like a PDA but has a large enough screen to be readable and useful. Quality and craftsmanship are high.

Part one of the 5-part review is up now

Akihabaranews have posted their 3-day review of the Fujitsu FMV-U8240 UMPC. They had a Windows XP version to test and overall they were pretty impressed. How can you fail to be impressed with such an amazing example of modern technology. The Fujitsu is a full PC! Not a cut-down operating system and low-end processor architecture, a real PC! (with twice the CPU clockrate as my mothers desktop PC!)

There are a couple of things that I would like to comment on. Firstly WMV HD playback. Akihabara says it was ‘impossible to play’ but I know for sure that the Q1 Ultra can handle WMV 720HD at around 6mbps bitrate. The Fujitsu will be able to handle that too as its basically the same engine underneath the hood. I guess they were throwing something pretty heavy at it. 1024HD perhaps? Or maybe the battery saving profile was set to force low-performance/long battery life.

Functionality over form is an important thing to highlight. While the Sony UX is all bells and whistles with an, admittedly, stylish design, the Fujitsu appears to be the functionality winner. I’m guessing the keyboard in approaching twice the speed of the Sony UX and that’s going to make a huge difference to usability.

Battery is 2:30 to 3:30 and not the 4 hours listed on the spec sheet. This is something I predicted and wrote about in detail here (showing the ‘trick’ that manufacturers use to make the battery life figure look better than it is under real use scenarios.)

Akihabaranews review is here. Fujitsu UMPC specification page here.

There are still some outstanding questions though and I’m talking to Akihabara to try and get these answered.

• Soft Touch or Hard Touch screen?
• Battery capacity – V and Mah
• Keyboard  quality (how many characters per minute  compared to your normal typing speed.)
• Heat?
• Return from standby speed?
• Screen brightness? (outdoor? Comparison to another device?)
• How does it compare in usability to the Kohjinsha SA1? (Keyboard, speed, battery life)
• Is it really pocketable?
• How does the local price compare to, say, the top-end Q1 Ultra SSD?
• What do you think the target market of the device is?

Looking at some of the import prices (Dynamism and Geekstuff4u) you’re looking at a starting price of around $1700 which I estimate to be IRO $1400 as a locally distributed price. That positions it, pricing-wise, somewhere around the OQO, Sony UX and Q1 Ultra HSDPA mark. In terms of sizing and weight though, think more along the lines of the Raon Digital products, the Sony UX, OQO, Medion and Gigabyte products. (Here’s a comparison page showing those products with their sizes, weights and features.)