Fancy an Eee for the kitchen? One for the caravan? Garage? Our friends at Expansys UK are offering Eee PC 701 Surf UMPCs between 11am and 4pm today for, quite frankly, silly prices. The best thing is that if you order through these links today, you also support UMPCPortal as we get a few coins back for the ultra mobile PC testing fund! ultra mobile PC Friday: Selected deals between 11am and 4pm, 26th September 2008 ASUS Eee PC 701 Surf (White) Normally £155.99 Now only £117.99 inc VAT (£99.99 […]

That’s Ultra Mobile Devices to you and me and it’s a term I rather like. Anyway, back to the story where ABI Research tells us that the UMD market, comprising Netbooks, MIDs and UMPCs. (Don’t ask us which definitions they’re using!) will reach, wait for it, 200 million units by 2013. The interesting prediction is that by 2013, MIDs (Lets assume they mean small, handheld PMP-style Internet devices) will surge to meet 68% of that figure and netbooks sales will drop back to second place. I agree with the general […]

If Intel can prevent OEM’s from using the Dual Core CPU in their netbook and notebook designs, how come they can’t stop Dell using the Z-Series Atom in a notebook? Just as the Dual-core CPU could damage notebook sales, so to could putting a 12" screen on a netbook, even if it didn’t have a dual-core CPU inside. I was alerted to this misnomer [hmmm wrong word perhaps. Anomaly?] today via a brief news item today from Tony Smith of The Register who draws the conclusion that the name of […]

One good thing about the flood of netbooks is that consumers get lots of choice. Believe it or not, there are a few netbooks that manage to stand out from the others. I feel that the IdeaPad S10 has the potential to stand out; it looks quite attractive, and you’ll see in the unboxing video from Laptop.com that it appears to be slightly smaller than the Asus EEE 1000H, and the MSI Wind. Interestingly, it seems to have 2 RAM slots. I’m really not a fan of the tiny right […]

Update: I’m currently live on UMPCPortal.com/live testing this out if you fancy seeing it in action. Update: Live session summary below. Today, One of the Canonical mobile team members released details of a new distribution based on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) aimed at ‘MIDs’ with screen sizes from 7-9″ After a simple download and copy to a flash drive the Q1 Ultra booted straight into a live linux session running in RAM and everything seems to work out of the box. Touch, brightness, wifi, BT and more. This is exciting. There’s […]

I recall seeing this solution a while back on JKKMobile but Paul from MoDaCo has now got one for testing. Its a 47Wh battery pack for the HTC Shift from Mugen which should allow about 5hrs online time thus solving one of the HTC Shift’s biggest problems. It’s a tidy solution but at nearly $240, it’s a huge amount to pay for 5 hrs of computing time. Paul is doing further testing and will report back on performance soon.

Jkk has managed to find a short story on the ‘Nebraska Library Commission Blog‘ that mentions a list of libraries in the state that are getting hardware courtesy of the Gates Foundation: The Nebraska Library Commission is proud to announce that the following 48 Nebraska public libraries have been awarded WiFi Connectivity Grants, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Each library will be receiving a Linksys WiFi Router and a Dell laptop or Samsung Q1 Ultra UMPC. Interesting to say the least. There isn’t much detail on what […]

You may have seen some news over the last few days that Intel has started to ship a dual core variant of their Atom processor. To some of you that may sound like good news for the mobile world as nearly every new netbook seems to be running on Atom, and who doesn’t like a boost in performance? Well, as jkk points out, unfortunately the dual core Atom CPU is not for netbooks, they are actually for nettops, or low cost desktops. In the beginning, there were two types of […]