Three pieces of WiBrain news to bring you today.

Matt Miller, the Mobile Gadgeteer, has tested out a WiBrain and seems to be quite impressed. Like me though, he found it just a little bit too big for mobile use. I’m far happier with the Everun. Matt, I highly recommend you look at the Everun. Its smaller, lighter, has longer battery life and if it’s a full, fast browser you want, the Everun will satisfy. If you need the media support though, the WiBrain is the one to go for. Oh and about that Skype camera

problem, WiBrain released a fix for it today and we’ve had confirmation that it works. Details here.

If you already have a WiBrain, you’ll be looking forward to the accessory range that’s coming out. How about getting the whole range for free? It’s possible. All you have to do is write an owner-review of the WiBrain and send it to WiBrain for a chance to win. Full details are on the WiBrain website.

There’s an interesting story over at News.com today about a stealth startup called Montalvo Systems. It seems that the company is developing new low-power techniques for x86 compatible CPU architectures that they will design and hand out to a third party to make. A ‘fab-less’ (not fabuous!) semiconductor company, as they are known. Basically, they want to do exactly what Centaur and VIA have just started with the Isaiah architecture for low-power computing. The article gives some good pointers about the history of various similar startups that have failed to compete in Intel’s back-yard.

Montalvo systems’ website is here but there’s not much on it right now! Hopefully the link will have Google-value for them in the future because I tip my hat to anyone that is brave enough to enter the low-power computing market right now because the importance of power drain in the CPU is fading. Intel’s Silverthorne CPU already means that graphics processing, backlighting, storage, radios, software design and motherboard design are now the most important factors in keeping the power drain of a mobile computer down. Not the CPU.

Personally, I think they’re going for the patent portfolio or a licensing-deal (AMD?) rather than a real product.

Source: News.com

The N82 is my first real smartphone. I had an E90 for a short while but that’s not what I call a 24/7 phone as It’s way too big and way too expensive. The N82 seems just right in that it provides the same software capability and processing platform as the E90 and N95 but offers it in a far more consumer-friendly package. It can do anything that the amazing N95 and E90 can, from SIP telephony to video playback, music, imaging, navigation and TV-output. Its well laid-out and the […]

Reports about Intel’s launch of Silverthorne at the ISSCC in San Francisco are emerging this evening. From what I can see there are no real surprises. TDP (Max power requirement) is 0.6W for the low-speed part (Stealey is 3.5W) and up to 2W for the high speed, 2Ghz part. All this is pretty irrelevant at the moment as no details have been given about Poulsbo, the chipset/GPU that will accompany every CPU.

Idle figures down to 0.01W are being quoted but again, this is irrelevant when the biggest power drain in these states are the screen, radios and storage.

You’ll see a lot of figures thrown about in the next 48 hours but the real story to focus on is that, on terms of device power drain, the CPU is out of the equation now. It’s all about screen backlighting, storage power, radio power and an efficient board design. One year ago Intel promised the first sub-4W mobile Internet device. It looks like they are on target which means that, once everything is built down to handheld sizes (that includes the battery) we’re still only looking at 3 hours battery life. In a device as big as the Everun though, 6-8 hours could be possible. Add in the design freedom that Silverthorne brings and, while you might not see the fist x86 smartphone with Menlow, you’ll see a wide and exciting range of designs.

Source: ZDNet

If you’re living in city that gets affected by the Carnival week leading up to Ash Wednesday, it’s likely that you won’t have even considered PC’s in the last few days. Karneval has been in full swing here in the Cologne area and although I was having a few days holiday in the less Karneval-crazy south of Germany, I didn’t escape the madness. When I got back, everyone was still partying so I felt obliged to join in (see right.) It wasnt all play though as I did some good moblogging tests (and beat my height and speed record for blogging – 1100m and 155km/h) I’m back at my desk now, filtering through thousands, of RSS-based posts trying to see if anything major has happened in the last 5 days. It doesn’t appear so but there are a few bits of interesting news to go through. Firstly though, I’m glad to see that some of you enjoyed, or at least got some value, from the CPU overview article. It was read over 1300 times in 5 days! [read more after the jump]

Its been a boring weekend news-wise. We missed some videos however, so here they are.

First up we have something that will definitely make Chippy happy, as its a gadget bag video! This time it happens to be Rodfather’s. Great stuff, that U810 looks awesome.

Next we have some Noahpad videos. Meh. I barely consider this news-worthy. Keyboard looks like it will be hard to use.  [EDIT: I just realized chippy posted the first one already. If you have seen it, don’t torture yourself with it again ;-)]

This last one is actually a week old, and comes from Thoughtfix. In his latest video he explains why people would want/need secondary internet devices. I enjoyed this one.

And thats about it for videos this weekend. There has been some discussion on our forums about the P100, the successor to LG’s C1. From the specs it looks like a great machine, however its too big to be considered a UMPC. Therefore that’s pretty much all you are gonna hear about it from us. Head on over to the forums for some details.

Anyone gonna stream the Super Bowl to their UMPC? Or is that pushing it a bit? ;-)

Till Monday everyone, I’m off to listen to the new MoTR.

One of the services I really believe will be a success early in the life of the ‘mobile internet’ is location-aware search. It brings a lot of value to customers, the platform provider and of course the provider of the desired service. I’ve only had my N82 for 5 days and while i’ve been away it’s been great to be able to use the location information through Nokia Maps and the location-aware search through Google Maps. It’s been fun (albeit a little annoying for my family i’m sure) to announce […]

With the N82 taking GPS, email reading, rss, photo and video duties (no phone calls today!) and the Everun doing the man’s tasks of rich content creation and with both fitting in my jacket pockets I felt I was able to tackle any task that came up today. Photo-blogging at 1200m (with an aborted attempt at 1500m due to wind, frozen fingers and a very poor GPRS signal) with the family meant that I had to travel light and be quick with my testing. I can’t think of a combination […]