Hot on the heals of the Dell Mininote leak are these images which just dropped into our forum. This posts are titled ‘Aspire One.’
It’s got the same touchpad as seen on the HP 2133 and what appears to be an 8.9″ screen. Images show a, probably linux-based, user interface. Anyone recognize that UI?
Thanks ‘Liza’ whoever you are. We’ll be looking out for this at Computex and as soon as we have enough info, we’ll add it to the database.
According to his information in that pag, Acer’s Mini-Note is called “Aspire One”, running Windows XP SP3 on the 8.9 screen with resolution of 1024 X 768. The ODM partner is Quanta, the main notebook ODM partner of HP, DELL and Apple. The source thinks “Aspire One” is better looking than Asus’ EEE PC, however, no photo release yet.
Looks like it’s an Atom/Diamondville-based device. Digitimes mentions a 299 Euro price which is 100 Euro cheaper than the Eee PC 900!
Yesterday, I completed the final part of a series of upgrades that have been done to my Q1 Ultra to bring it up to what is close to my ideal all-round ultra mobile PC device. In this article I’ll outline what I’ve done and give you some detail about my most recent upgrade, swapping the 60GB hard drive out for an 8GB flash drive. The difference is quite remarkable. Not only do test results show up to 4x the read speed and 2x write speed but boot-times are quicker and the overall responsiveness of the system is improved dramatically. If you need convincing that SSD’s are fast before you take the jump, check out the video at the end of the (long and media-rich) post. Note that much of this applies to other devices that use 1.8" drives. The Sony UX, Fujitsu U810, HTC Shift and others.
Following the introduction of what appeared to be a value-pack in the UK where the 600Mhz non-bluetooth Q1 Ultra was being packaged with the keyboard and organiser pack for 500 pounds [aff link] , it appears Samsung Germany are dropping prices too. The price for the 800Mhz Q1 Ultra, 60GB, 1GB with XP at Amazon.de has just dropped from 1100 to 899 which brings it nearer to the 850 price of the R2E. The HSDPA version is steady at 1200 which is very expensive in comparison now.
200 Euros is a great price saving but you’d think that after one year of sales, Samsung would have some flexibility and drop it into a consumer pricing zone. 900 Euros still isn’t attractive to most consumers.
Compare it to an Eee PC 701 and you get these features with my estimated end-user value in brackets.
Higher screen res + Touchscren (100 Euros value)
60Gb storage (50 Euros value)
Bluetooth (20 Euros value)
Lighter and smaller (value depends on user but no keyboard offsets that.)
XP Tablet edition (100 Euros value)
1GB RAM (50 Euros value)
That’s a total of 320 Euros value for 600 Euros higher cost. Personally I regard the Samsung Q1 Ultra as a much better device than the Eee PC and I put a very high value on its mobility and flexibility but for most people, that’s simply not the case.
Update: Marc points out that the 600Mhz version in the UK can be had for 449 pounds (565 Euros) making it very comparable with the Eee PC 701 + 40Gb HDD + XPTE + Touchscreen + Higher Res + 1GB upgrade + Lighter and smaller.
Here’s a question: If the Q1 Ultra was 599 Euro, which would you buy. The Q1 or the Eee PC 701?
Xmangerm, a Fuji U810 owner, did exactly what you’re supposed to do with a ultra mobile PC at the weekend and that is work wherever you want to!
Today is a wonderful day therefore I have decided to hang out on my balcony with my handy dandy UMPC. The screen is only 5.6 inches but it handles everything I throw at it. I am a happy camper.
We’re running little UMPC-on-holiday photo competition in the UMPCPortal forums over the next quarter so if you take your ultra mobile PC on holiday with you (as is the law, no matter what your partner says!) make sure you send in some pics. The best one wins a prize.
This very brief bit of info from Current in Australia could be read one of two ways. Either you read it that ASUS is launching a new, tablet version of the Eee PC and you get excited about the prospect of a new sub-$400 ultra mobile PC or you take a wider view and consider that ASUS already have 3 versions of the R2 touchscreen devices already on low-power platforms, one that never launched and another twodevices launching with Atom. [Click on images about for details.] The current R2E is already a very good value device and a small bit of re-engineering and re-marketing could easily see this launched as a low-cost Eee-branded UMPC. Moving an old design into a new brand to give it a boost makes total sense to me and although it wouldn’t be ‘new’, I’m sure a new price would stimulate a lot of interest.
We’re just finalising a review of the R2E which will be up next week and I’m going to follow up with a post that shows how the R2E is just a re-marketing exercise away from being an R2Eee
The news broke a few days through Digitimes that VIA are set to migrate their CPU’s to 45nm production by late 2009. Moving to a smaller production process means watt usage should decrease or that processing power can be increased without increasing watt usage. This move is remarkable because their first 65nm CPU (Isaiah architecture) is yet to ship.
The Isaiah CPU is said to be introduced with a 2Ghz clock speed which makes it unlikely this will be a ULV CPU, as we already speculated before. When a ULV version will be available has not yet been announced but it is not expected before the end of 2008.
Most, if not all of you reading this will have heard of the Firefox browser and many of you will have tried Firefox 3.0 beta. I held back from using it for a long time because it was beta software but the latest release candidate seems stable and has me converted on all platforms now. Firefox 3.0 is fast. Firefox 3.0 is memory efficient. Firefox 3.0 has great features and overall its a clear winner on ultra mobile PC and netbook platforms, especially when using online applications.
Like Safari, it appears from my test results that Firefox 3.0 can process java-heavy pages on a Ghz-class ultra mobile PC faster than the data arrives over my 6mbps Internet connection which means that for rich Internet applications, the bottleneck is at the remote server and there’s very little else you can do to speed up the experience. Apparently, java processing in FF3 is many many times faster than in version 2 so this explains the big improvement with online applications. Not only is the speed improved but there are some great features that will appeal to ultra mobile PC users too. But first, here’s some test results. I took 5 devices and ran speed tests on 3 browsers [*1] using reader.google.com as the target page. It’s a java-heavy page and there’s no flash or major numbers of images to process but its typically my slowest-loading browser application. It represents a typical online application and for web-workers, its a good, tough benchmark.
Most Internet users only use a handful of websites on a regular basis. The same is true of applications too. Want proof? Take a look at Wakoopa and find out for yourself how you use your applications. Me? I’m a 88%+ Firefox user of you look at my recent stats. [More after the image]
