Not much of interest here for ultra mobile PC and MID fans as AMD’s Puma notebook platform is launched. MiniNote devices might be possible with a core removal and down-clocking but don’t expect netbook prices. AMD are clearly not focusing on ultra low power systems yet but are prepared to address a market in 2010. This from ZDNet.

Scott Shutter, notebook division brand manager at AMD, said the chip maker’s goal with its next generation notebook platform is to cover 80 percent of the market. That means AMD is ceding the high-speed niche of the notebook to Intel as well as the ultra mobile PC market. Shutter explained that the ultra mobile PC market just doesn’t have the demand to warrant AMD’s attention yet.

“Our roadmap has us going there (the ultra mobile PC market) in the future–the first half of 2010. We will have products that play into that space when we believe that growth warrants it,” says Shutter.

So it raises the question, why did we see an AMD-based ultra mobile PC with the Turion X2 branding on it yesterday? I can only surmise that this is a very early, underclocked prototype until we get some further clarification.

JKK and myself tackle a Computex Day 1 Round-up podcast.

Covering all the mobile and ultra-mobile news coming out of Taipei. Intel Atom netbooks. Linux and Moblin distributions for netbooks, CPU platforms. 

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Fresh news from Computex!

IVT has just announced that they have ported the Bluesoleil 5.0 bluetooth stack found on lots of computers to Linux. The program retains its GUI and user friendliness and is supposedly ported specificaly for UMPCs. However with all the naming confusion thats around and the fact that very few UMPCs actually run linux, we assume they mean Netbooks and MIDs. Expect this to provide a good experience with bluetooth on quite a few devices in the future.

Source.

It looks like Elonex are just about to launch some additions to their notebook range. They currently sell the Elonex One in the UK which is a 99 pound ($200) netbook with a detachable keyboard but if you take a look at the new products section on the Computex website you’ll find images of 4 new products. There’s the OneTwo3g which sports a voip phone, the OneTwo3 8 (top right in the picture) which is presumably an 8.9" device that I swear I’ve seen before somewhere, and then there’s a 10.2" device called the…you guessed it, OneTwo3 10.2. Apparently its the ‘Worlds first 10.2" UMPC.’ They obviously didn’t check my diagram!

Click to Enlarge.

Oh, One more thing. There’s also a OneTwoLite which is supposed to be a sub $200 device.

Unfortunately, no specifications are given on the devices but based on the fact that it’s netbook week, I guess we’re looking at at least two Intel Atom-based devices in the 8 and 10.2" models.

The 912 surfaced a few days ago on the Gigabyte website without an image but the official image is up now. [Gigabyte product page]

With an 8.9" screen at 1280×768 in a case that’s not a few mm bigger than the Eee PC 900, it looks like it could be a real VyeS37 killer. Assuming the device is based on Diamondville, it will have similar performance and with its 32wh battery its likely to have a much better battery life than the Vye which was never the efficient device that it could have been.  3-4 hours is a possibility on the standard battery with this.

According to Crave, Taiwan [Translation] some pricing info has been given out too. RR Pricing is said to be a very competitive 20,000 Taiwanese Dollars which is about 660 US. Dollars. They also reveal that the device has a web-cam, 2.5" SATA drive and an ExpressCard slot. No details on whether it’s a hard or soft touchscreen yet.

I’ve updated the M912 details in the database.

Thanks Bamei

The M704 is the smallest 7″ 1024×600 ultra mobile PC you can buy. It’s got a 3hr+ battery life, 1.2Ghz VIA C7 CPU, slide-out keyboard, has a good set of accessories available, weighs under 800gm and comes in at a good value price. Why is it that I’m not getting excited? Because of images like this? [see full article…]

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For someone who quit his job and risked part of the family income on the term ‘UMPC’ its not surprising that I give the occasional thought to whether the ultra mobile PC market will continue to grow! The related meme that started on Friday was an extremely interesting one to follow. It was kicked-off by Gizmodo who asked ‘Subnotebook vs. ultra mobile PC vs. Netbook: WTF Is the Difference?’ Engadget and a number of other websites followed-up.

Looking at all the posts and reviewing all the tags against analytics, trends and search results, it does appear that ‘UMPC’ is now established as a commonly used search term, especially in the last 9 months. In comparison, the terms netbook, subnotebook and mininote appear to be almost background noise and the search results are certainly not clean. MID is a common search term but again, it doesn’t return usable search results. Its future as a marketing tag is questionable although Intel do appear to be putting a lot of weight behind it and it could change quickly. I suspect it will shake out to be a commonly used term before the end of 2008. After scribbling around on paper for a few hours, this is what I ended up with as a simple definition for 2008. [More after the image…]

 
Mobile device segmentation – 2008.

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I’m a big fan of using UMPCs as desktops. In my normal daily work there’s nothing that I can’t do on my ultra mobile PC and with the future looking good for more powerful devices, even normal desktop users should be able to run their daily work on a ultra mobile PC but it doesn’t work if you keep having to plug cables in and out all over the place. A simple, single cable or docking port solution is what’s needed. The i7210, OQO and M704 all have nice docking stations but many other UMPCs, including my current Q1 Ultra, don’t.

A recent article by Jenn over at Pocketables made me give the universal USB docking station idea a second thought and this review of the Toshiba Dynadock now has me hovering over the order button. It supports multi-view via ‘DisplayLink’ technology, there’s a DVI-out version, ethernet, USB ports, headphone and mic ports a digital audio out port and even a serial port and the only thing you have to plug into the ultra mobile PC is a single USB cable.

An analogue, TV-out port would have been better than a serial port but for desktop operations and even in ‘set-top-box’ situations, the Dynadock looks perfect. Some video limitations mean that you won’t be able to run HD720 videos smoothly but for most people with UMPCs, that wouldn’t have been an expectation anyway.

Pricing for the DVI version runs to $180 but the analogue, VGA version is $150 but the street price (e.g. Amazon.com – right) is down to a very reasonable $107 for some models as I write this.

Check out the review at Trusted Reviews.

Via Engadget.