EviGroup CEO Nicolas Ruiz just emailed us to let us know that the official website of the EviGroup Pad [info] is now live. Unfortunately it’s in French at the moment but Google does a reasonable job of translating it to English although I’m not so sure about the ‘toes’ bit!

There are four versions of the device based around the same core hardware.

• Processor: 1.6Ghz Atom
• RAM: 1GB SO-DIMM 667Mhz. Slot. Ram interchangeable.
• Storage Capacity: 2’5 160GB HDD S-ATA.
• Display: 10.6-inch touchscreen, resistive.  Resolution 1024 * 600.
• Pointing Device: Stylus deployable, thumbs and fingers (toes as possible)
• Wireless connectivity: 3G / WiFi a / b / g
• Networking: Ethernet
• Lithium-Ion Removable: 3 hours of time average.
• Devices internal microphone, webcam Front 1300000 pixels.
• Ports SD / MMC / MS (SDHC Compatible)
• Connectivity: 1 x VGA, 3 x USB2 ports, jack, microphone jack.
• Weight: 990g (battery included)
• Dimensions: 260x160x22mm

The best way to describe it would be as a T101H without the keyboard. At 900gm its a very interesting productivity option, I recon the prices aren’t too bad either. 620 for the 3G version seems quite interesting as part of a mobile productivity kit. Note that the RAM is upgradeable too.

• Tablet Pad Standard without Windows 7 without Seline10: 489 € + 30 € charges.
• Tablet Pad Standard with Windows 7 Home Premium and Seline10: 549 € + 30 € charges.

The Elite version includes 3G:

• Tablet Pad Elite 7 with Windows Home Premium and Seline10: 599 € + 30 € charges.
• Tablet Pad Elite without Windows 7 without Seline10: 539 € + 30 € charges.

My main questions are:

• What does ‘Seline’ give me?
• Does the tablet enable touch features in Windows 7?
• What’s the real battery life?

We’re trying to get hold of a review unit.

Evigroup Pad Web site

Several days back we looked at the then just released Asus Eee T91MT which featured an resistive multitouch screen. We were also treated to a little T91MT promotional video showing off some of the things that you could do with the T91MT. One of those things appeared to be pressure sensitivity, but after some hands on time with the T91MT, kubel from myt91.info found it to lack pressure sensitivity of any sort which was somewhat of a disappointment.

Fast forward a bit and now kubel as found that the T91MT really does have pressure sensitivity with one caveat, it isn’t enabled by default. Not sure exactly how many levels of pressure the T91MT can detect, but it is nice to see this technology in a resistive touch screen.

He’s even got a video to prove it:

[GottaBeMobile]

What a hectic few hours!  I’ve had DHL at the door with the Archos 5 Mini Dock, a tweet from Pocketables alerting me that the new firmware is available and the whole lot has been captured in a video. I’ll say no more than this:

• Mini-dock = Bargain!
• YouTube HD on TV = Fantastic!
• IR RF keyboard and mouse = Total TV laziness.
• Mini keyboard and mouse = Mini ‘Web’ PC under 500gm and 300 Euro!

It looks like some hard drives with no external power won’t work but I tested a few USB SD-card adaptors and it worked fine. Questions remain over 3G sticks.

As for the firmware, there are a lot of improvements. Check the updates page for details.

More images in the gallery.

More information about the Archos 5 Internet Tablet here.

Update: TV interference is purely due to trying to record a CRT. For a better look at TV-out put using an HDMI dock, Check out Charbax’s video here.

Help your UMPCPortal! Buy the Archos 5 Mini-Dock through our affiliates.

• ARCHOS Mini Dock für ARCHOS 5 / 5g und ARCHOS 7
• Archos Germany ordering page for 8GB (not in stock – see selection boxes on page.)
• ARCHOS Mini Dock for ARCHOS 5 & ARCHOS 7
• Mini Dock at Amazon US (Not available at present)

A company called Innovative Convergent Devices has put info up on their website about a new device called the Vega, which purportedly will be an Android 2.0 powered slate device which will come in your choice of size: 7 inch, 11 inch or up to a whooping 15.6 inch.

Check the specs (likely subject to change):

• Android OS
• 7/11/15.6 inch resistive touchscreen at 1366×768
• Nvidia Tegra (probably the Tegra 600 or 650, which are both Arm 11)
• 4 hour battery life
• 512MB of RAM
• 512MB of memory (expandable through MicroSD)
• Bluetooth and WiFi b/g
• Options for 2G or 3G data module
• headphone jack and webcam
• dual microphones
• accelerometer

And one other thing listed on the spec sheet that is rather odd: 262,000 colors (6-bit) which seems sort of low for a device that claims to be usable for HD content.

The press release on IDC’s site says that the device will be released through “Tier 1 inch carriers in the US, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, which should mean that the device will be subsidized. They are also set to show off a demo unit at this year’s CES (Jan 7-10) and hope to launch in the first half of 2010.

There is a lot of talk about the Vega being a “no compromise inch product that consumers really want, however, I don’t know about you… but I’d call a slate device with no physical keyboard and a resistive touchscreen just that: a compromise. Your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.

[GottaBeMobile]

Over the last 6 months or so, Viliv has created a near rebirth of the UMPC, stunning a good number of people with the highly regarded S5 and X70. Not to long after, they brought the Viliv S7, their first device with a keyboard. I wrote an article back in July titled: The Viliv S7’s biggest challenge: the keyboard. After having a chance to review the S7 for myself, I found the keyboard to be the most disappointing part of the S7. At the same time however the S7 made me very excited for Viliv’s upcoming 10″ version, the S10.

What we’ve see so far from the S10 has shown it to be a very attractive device. If the S10 has the footprint to offer a good typing experience, and still delivers the good points of the S7, I feel that the S10 could break through and become a serious netbook competitor which will put the name Viliv in front of a large new audience that they haven’t yet had access to.

The keyboard forecast on the S10 is looking really good so far. From early pictures that Chippy shot of the unit at IDF 09 I can see that the S10’s footprint gave Viliv enough room to fix every single issue that I noted in my S7 review. They fixed the tiny right shift key by dropping the arrow keys down and providing enough space for a full right shift key. They fixed the F11 and F12 keys being bound to F9 and F10 as the extra width provided room for these keys to be in their own dedicated space. They also put the tilde key back where it needs to go, which aligns the number row correctly, and fixed other things like odd punctuation placement and backward Fn/ctrl keys.

But netbooks as of late have offered rather good typing experiences, so presuming that the S10’s keyboard can match these, how does the S10 stand a chance of competing against already established brands? The answer to this lies in the S10’s battery life, convertibility, and high res screen.

The S7 had hugely impressive battery life, running for almost 6 hours at 100% CPU usage, 100% brightness, and WiFi+BT turned on. This means that the S7 should run for around 8 hours with regular usage. Incredibly fast standby times allow one to extend the battery life of the S7 to great lengths. If the S10 can offer the same speedy standby and huge battery life, it’ll beat out most existing netbooks and would be great for a thin, light weight, ‘all day’ computing experience. Viliv is currently quoting the S10 as having 10 hours of battery, and given Viliv’s previous battery life claims I would say this is fairly accurate, and within an hour of realistic usage.

The S10 isn’t 100% official yet, but the one that Chippy looked at in an IDF 09 video hands-on had a 1366×768 resolution screen, which again beats out most of the netbook contenders. Then there is the flexibility that the touchscreen and convertible aspect offer. The majority of netbooks out there today aren’t touchscreen equipped and definitely aren’t convertible. This fact alone puts the S10 in direct competition with devices like the Gigabyte TouchNote [Portal page] and Asus Eee T91 [Portal page].

If the S10 can be competitive in the netbook field and stand its ground against the existing convertible options, I think that it could have a big impact on Viliv as a company getting the company into the eyes of a much broader range than they’ve been used to because previously they’ve been dealing in a rather niche market, and for ultra mobile PC fans out there — some of that additional market may flow through Viliv to their other devices, and introduce new people to the world of UMPCs.

Of course it will all really depend on the price that Viliv picks for the S10. Hopefully it’ll hit low enough to compete with netbooks and will create choice and competition for consumers, while being an impressive debut product for Viliv’s foray into the netbook space. Most of the other players will have some serious catching up to do if the S10 jumps onto the scene with a reasonable price, 10 hour battery life, great keyboard, high-res screen and convertible form factor to boot!

Sascha from Netbooknews has just tweeted that the Kindle application for the PC is now available. ‘This is the beginning of the end for the Kindle hardware’ he says.

Well I’ve installed the software, linked it to an account in the UK and sure enough, it works like a charm. I just bought a book online, hit F5 and there it was on the PC.

As you can see I’ve got it running on my Gigabyte T1028M with the convertible touchscreen. I’ve rotated the screen and set the text to max width. That’s what it looks like on a 600×1028 screen. The margins are somewhat wide don’t you think? Touching the screen on the left and right margins changes page. You can access the contents, cover and bookmarks but you can’t make notes or highlights. That’s coming soon…

As with all our services, we plan to continue improving Kindle for PC. Below are some features we are thinking about bringing to Kindle for PC in the near future:

• Create notes and highlights
  Thanks to Whispersync, you can already read your notes and highlights from other devices on Kindle for PC. We’d like to add the ability to create notes and highlights using the Kindle for PC application.
• Search
  Find a word or a sentence in the book you are currently reading.
• Zoom and rotate images
  Click on an image to see an expanded view and rotate it if desired.

Images (the cover at least) are in glorious Technicolor!

Next up…the Viliv X70. It’s a tablet, much lighter and one of the best PC’s you can get if you want to take advantage of the Kindle for PC software [Article: What’s the best PC for the Kindle PC software?]

I’ll run off a quick video of the X70 and post it in a new article. or should I read a book. Hmm…

Not too long ago we wondered what happened to the T91 which seemed to launch only to quickly succumb to a total lack of supply in the face of big demand.

There still doesn’t appear to be one simple answer as to why the Asus Eee T91 [Portal page] went through some awfully turbulent supplies at its initial launch, but it would seem that to a certain extent things were waiting on Windows 7.

Now suddenly it looks like Dynamism and Amazon have plenty of T91s to sell, and the aptly named and multi-touch capable T91MT, which Chippy mentioned was pre-ordering last week, is now shipping as well.

The T91MT is the first multi-touch version of the T91 and it ships with Windows 7 (the regular T91 ships with XP). It still isn’t even official on Asus.com, but I suppose that isn’t stopping vendors like Amazon from selling it.

Seems like ‘kubel’ from recently established MyT91.info is one of the first to get his/her hands on the T91MT and has already provided an unboxing with a full review soon to come.

We’ll have to wait on further reports, but a glance at a T91MT intro video on YouTube seems to imply that the unit is capable of pressure sensitivity and palm rejection despite lacking an active digitizer which is quite an interesting proposition.

Update: Kubel from myt91.info has left us some info in the coments, and among other things say that the T91MT does not appear to have a pressure sensitive screen (ie: can’t tell the difference between a hard touch and a soft touch). This is disappointing to hear, but then again we can’t really expect full tablet PC features on a little netbook sized (and priced) convertible.

It is rather interesting that a number of new slate style tablet devices seem to be warring even before they are officially launched, or even proven exist. The two most frequently rumored are definitely the CrunchPad and the even more elusive Apple Tablet. While the Apple Tablet may or may not even exist, we’ve at least seen offical prototypes of the CrunchPad, and it seemed to be generally near completion until all any new info surrounding its release has halted in the last few months.

The CrunchPad shot up the popularity ladder in the Portal shortly after being added, and held the number one spot for a good period of time. Despite seemingly no one calling the CrunchPad a UMPC, lots of traffic clearly interested in the CrunchPad was landing on the CrunchPad’s Portal page.

The CrunchPad has only recently been supplanted by the likes of the Archos 9 [Portal page] and the Viliv X70 [Portal page]:The CrunchPad is a project started by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. In July of 2008, an article titled “We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It. inch written by Arrington, went up on TechCrunch. To date that article has produced 1,235 comments in the comment section of the article alone and also countless numbers of articles from other sites in response. Between that time and a month or two ago, the CrunchPad has received quite a bit of attention with various prototypes spotted and a good deal of news and search attention. Note the news reference volume in the graph below which shows how frequently the CrunchPad is searched for (compared to Archos 9 for context):The most recent news that seemed to decry an imminent release of the CrunchPad was that Michael Arrington had teamed up with a small company in Singapore called Fusion Garage for the design, and there is another entity apparently called CrunchPad Inc. which may or may not be involved in getting the device produced (or could possibly be a renaming of Fusion Garage itself).

But much of this news is from back in July. There were reports (read: rumors) that stated that a CrunchPad event may be held at the end of July, or in August, launching or otherwise officially declaring the final CrunchPad device. That date has since come and gone, and here we are, a few days from November, and it seems like all has been quiet on the CrunchPad front. So where in the world is Carmen Sandiego the CrunchPad?

Perhaps the CrunchPad has been waiting on Pixel Qi’s technology to develop? This is just a guess, but I don’t see anyone else taking a shot at the question.Pixel Qi is a company (sometimes referred to as the name of the technology itself) that is working on a type of screen technology that promises to bring inexpensive power saving e-ink like screens to mobile computers using existing LCD manufacturing processes. The Pixel Qi site has a small update box that has this to say:

We have passed early reliability testing with flying colors and are still on track to start mass production of our screens in late Q4 2009.

And while it might seem obvious that Pixel Qi would let people know if they have been working on screens for the CrunchPad to generate interest in the technology, and the device, the following was written on the Pixel Qi blog on October 17th under an article titled “Pixel Qi Screens debuting in Tablets inch:

While we are supplying screens for tablets (and ebooks, and netbooks too!) and are starting production shortly, including supplying limited volumes earlier than our official mass production start we can’t say when these products will be announced and sold retail.

Sorry not to be able to reveal more, but our customers: the netbook, ebook and tablet makers really need to announce their products on their schedules.

With a few CrunchPad articles mentioning a November release, I’d say that it is at least possible that the CrunchPad devlopment and the Pixel Qi screens are coinciding, and maybe the CrunchPad hold-up is due in part to Pixel Qi screen technology still working its way out the door.

Alternate theories? Please feel free to share below.