Now that I have your attention, take note that the M912V and M912X are now shipping. Mobilx have a quantity on 912V’s awaiting customs clearance and the X versions will leave Taiwan in a few days. Go get em!

The pic comes direct from Nvision where The Tech Report got some hands on.  They seem to be impressed but question the battery life. Commenters there also question the price but when you consider the fast disk, hi-res screen, PCI-Express, easy access to card slot, disk and memory and the convertible touch feature, I cant see that there’s really much to moan about. This is a netbook that reaches into the pro-mo (sorry, prosumer-mobile) sector.

In the article you’ll see a reference to a new digital TV-enabled version which is probably why they’re at the Nvision show. We’ve just had news of that too from Mobilx. It will be a M912M with DVB-T module know as the M912T. Availability is planned for Oct but frinal price in unknown. Budget for something like a $70-$100 premium. This will be the first time we’ve seen a ultra mobile PC or netbook with integrated DVB module in Europe and with that fast S-ATA drive and the good media capabilities, raw MPEG-2 recording in direct digital from the DVB stream is going to be easy, making a great multimedia recording and playback system. SageTV should work a treat on this so fingers crossed for a built-in IR receiver, TV-out and remote control. Or will they ship with Vista for the media center? I hope not. I was going to get the M912M but if the 912T is running XP, I’m definitely going to wait for it. Stay tuned for more details.

Details and news for the M912 models here.

Has anyone else in Europe spotted a massive price drop on the Fujitsu P1610? For about two weeks the prices have been at the 800 Euro mark. which is about a 50% discount over previous prices.

The P1610 is a well-respected ultra mobile workhorse. Good build quality, hi-res screen, fingerprint reader, heavy-touch screen for reduced vectoring, PCMCIA slot and extended battery capability. It runs XP TE and Vista Business (dual-boot as I understand it) on a Core Solo processor at 1.2Ghz and weighs 1.2KG which is the same as an MSI Wind or Eee PC 901. At its previous price of over 1600 Euros it was out of reach for most people but at 800 Euros, its a different matter.  [Article continues…]

Read the full story

JKK has the Kohjinsha SX3 UMPC. Its an 8.9" convertible touchscreen device running Windows Vista on the Atom Silverthorne processor at 1.3Ghz. As a package it looks good although wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to remove the DVD and put a battery in its place. I also have a few reservations about Vista on 1.3Ghz having used the SC3, a smaller version of this running the same CPU/OS combination. JKK’s unboxing video is below.

Keep any eye on JKKmobile.com as I think he’s going to run a live session later. Unfortunately i’ll be traveling back from the U.S. so I won’t be able to join in.

Click the icon for more info on the SX3 (specs, links, news, gallery)

In the Gigabyte M912X unboxing last week, the second thing I mentioned was the washed-out screen. The following morning, in my tests,  it was clear that the screen was taking too much power. Ding! Of course, it was a CCFL-backlit screen.

I sent an email to Gigabyte who have confirmed that the (production) 1280×768 screen is CCFL backlit. They also told me that the 1024×600 screened version is LED-backlit. The 1024×600 screen will be installed in the M912M version.

For those not familiar with the terms, CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp) is the old, power-hungry and often low-brightness backlighting method. LED (Light Emitting Diode) is the newer, much more power efficient and higher-brightness (mostly) method. In this case, it means that if you take a lower resolution screen, you get more battery life (it could be a significant amount, taking the standard 4-cell battery up to 3.5hrs browsing time) and, potentially a much brighter screen. All the LED 1024×600 screens I’ve seen so far have had great colour balance too.

I’ll happily drop that 1280×768 screen to 1024×600 to get the extra brightness and longer battery life offered by a LED-backlit model but there’s a catch if you’re thinking the same way. The 1024×600 screen is only in the M912M model. For that you have to sacrifice the Bluetooth (not a big deal) take Windows XP (which is likely to be faster and run better in 1GB) take an 80Gb hard drive instead of 160GB and wait 2 weeks longer until the end of September for delivery. Personally, I think it’s worth it and I don’t think anything else is going to come along that has the same features for the same price.

In summary then, there are now two models. The high-end version and the low-end version. The high-end version is available with XP and Vista. (M912X, M912V) The low-end version only with XP (M912M) There will be no Linux version.

Read the highlights and lowlights and watch the live Q&A session here. See the unboxing here.

Side-by-side specification comparison here.

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

Bravo Nokia! Nearly a year before I started writing about ultra mobile devices, Nokia had launched the 770 Internet tablet. It was the 2nd device I ever mentioned over 2 years ago on what was then the Carrypad journal.

Nokia 770.
I got very excited about this device to start with. The screen and connectivity options looked perfect. Until you find out that its got a rather weak ARm-compatible Ti-Omap that doesnt look like it will get about 500kbps of divx, let alone the 1mbps needed for a reasonable 320×240 25fps experience. No keyboard and no pim software too. The 350 Euro price tells us something about where its marketed and that could be that its a test-device. Nokia have already announced that they might release new hardware with a keyboard. If they address the processor issues, they could be spot on. I’ve recently read about Naviflash – a commercial Navigation product built on Linux over Xscale so there’s potential even for decent nav software.
Fingers crossed for this one. For me its Nokia against Apple at the moment. [Feb 2006]

The TabletBlog.com has always been one of the best places to get the latest info on the Nokia Internet Tablets and Dan, AKA Thoughtfix, who runs the blog, has just published a really great read about what is effectively, a MID before MIDs were launched.

Nokia Internet Tablets Turn 3: Happy Anniversary! – TabletBlog

News links about the 770 going back to May 2006 can be found here. Datasheet here (product id #4!)