[img]https://www.umpcportal.com/origami/images/tabletkioskeo.jpg[/img]

Here is the message I got in my account at TabletKiosk:

April 24, 2006 Dear Valued Customer, Thank you very much for your pre-order of the eoâ„¢ v7110. The initial response to eoâ„¢ has been phenomenal; and as a result, we have sold out our entire initial production quantity. At TabletKiosk, our primary goal is to provide outstanding products and superior service that “exceeds our customers’ computing expectations. inch
Guided by this philosophy, we take great effort to ensure that our
machines perform exactly as they are promoted. As the end of April rapidly approaches, we find ourselves in the position of having to balance our commitment to quality with the expectation of a timely product delivery. After the process of quality control was completed on the first eoâ„¢ production units, it was determined that there was an issue in the tooling of the back panel that affected the operation of the system fan. Because of this problem, the back panel had to undergo a slight redesign and thus the initial shipment is going to be only a fraction of what we had anticipated. Additionally, we expect the supply of the eoâ„¢ to be extremely tight for the next 60 to 90 days as the production supply catches up to demand. If you are one of the lucky few who receives your eoâ„¢ on time, congratulations and we hope that it meets and exceeds your computing expectations. If not, we want to offer our sincere apologies and let you know that we are working hard to assure that the delay in receiving your order is as minimal as possible. As of now, we expect to have a majority of the orders fulfilled by the beginning of June. We hope that you can hang on until then, but in case you can not, feel free to contact our customer service department and we will cancel your order. Know, however, that if you decide upon this route and later change your mind, your new order will be placed in the queue in the order that it is received. Please rest assured that your credit card will not be charged until your order is shipped. We at TabletKiosk thank you for your patience and understanding and hope you agree with our decision that it’s better to get it right than to be first. Sincerely, The TabletKiosk Team

I don’t know yet if I’m one of the lucky ones but I’m really disappointed.

—
Posted by CTitanic to ULTRA MOBILE PCs TIPS at 4/24/2006 03:36:18 PM Read the full story

John Tokash wrote a piece about his experience at Maker Faire with the Samsung Q1, TabletKiosk eo, and the Founder MiniNote on his [url=http://blog.tokash.org/2006/04/22/my-first-umpc-hands-on-experience/]blog [/url]

Some bulleted points from his entry were:

* All 3 devices seemed responsive and not sluggish at all during my interactions.
* The Touch Pack program launcher is very pleasant.
* DialKeys will take some getting used to, but I think it will be only slightly less usable than the treo keyboard.
* Attendees seemed a little skeptical, but impressed.
* The Founder ultra mobile PC is really thin compared to the Samsung and eo.
* I agree with JK when he says that you can rest your hand on the screen without it interfering with your writing. That’s nice!
* The screen zooming is faster than I expected and much more readable than I expected, although several control panels (touch optimizations, system) become blank grey windows at the scaled 1024 resolution.
* Browsing the web with the ultra mobile PC form factor was great.
* I like the touch point mouse embedded in the eo. I’m guessing that some old DirectX full screen games won’t respond well to the touch screen, so an external mouse or a touch point is going to be useful in those cases. The Samsung doesn’t have a similar feature.

John and I also talked a little bit about the convention on the origamiportal irc channel on the server irc.cored.net channel name #origamiportal, so stop on by there and there may be some conversations going on about it.

Original Link at [url=http://blog.tokash.org/2006/04/22/my-first-umpc-hands-on-experience/]blog.tokash.org[/url] Read the full story

ultra mobile PC Buzz mentioned Dynamic Display Power Optimisation (D2PO) in a news item last month and at the time I didn’t have time to do any research on it. Having just put the ultra mobile PC product database live, its now time to take a look at D2PO and other technologies to see how they could improve the battery life of UMPC’s (and laptops) in the future.

Firstly, that D2PO story. D2PO is a display control technology rather than a display technology itself. (as far as I have found out in my research – I don’t work in the display industry and I’m happy to be corrected at any point. Any LCD experts out there care to comment?) An LCD controller has been developed by TMDisplay that can reduce the power needed to control an LCD panel by up to 30%. It does this by dynamically changing the way a screen is updated according to certain image characteristics. For example, as I write this journal entry, only small areas of my screen are changing every second. The screen is updating at a high rate and at every update, each pixel is being set to the required colour. That’s an overhead. By changing the way that the refreshes are done (actually by reducing the updates) power is saved. At the moment, D2PO is being developed in conjunction with Intel but, like other technologies, I’m sure that versions of D2PO will filter through very quickly to other CPU manufacturers under different names.

The first question you should be asking though is – how much power does a display controller use? Good question. It turns out that the controller used by TmDisplay in their test was using over 1 watt of power. That’s a lot. As much as the average utilisation of a Pentium-M or VIA C-7 ULV 1Ghz processor.

What does it mean for ultra mobile PC battery life? Lets take previous research and say that a ultra mobile PC device is going to use about 8 watts under average use. If we reduce that by 0.3 watt (30% of 1 watt), we’re talking about a 4% power reduction. Taking more research figures, that translates to about 6 min extra battery life on the best figures that we have.

6 minutes is not an amazing improvement but its the measure of improvement that we’re going to be seeing across the board for CPU, Battery, Disk, Display, Wireless radio and system control over the next year.

Here’s a summary of power-improvements we could see over the next 12 months.

• CPU and chipset power will be reduced by about 20% (based on some Intel Core Duo figures.)
• Battery life will be increased by about 10-15% (based on often quoted figures for improvements in current battery technology)
• LCD display and controller power will be reduced by 10-15%
• Wireless chipset power will be reduced by 10-20% (based on higher integration and improving silicon technologies.)
• Disk power will be reduced by 10% (possibly more if flash memory prices keep on falling and users are happy to swap-out content as they need it – do you really need to carry 100 hours of video around on your device?)
• System control (power-saving control mechanisms and API’s) will reduce overall power requirements by 20-30%

Can I make a prediction here? Carrypad’s law states that power requirements of mobile devices will reduce by 20% a year!

Taking our average load figures, here’s what we get in real terms:

• 2006 – Average ultra mobile PC life 2.5 hours
• 2007 – Average ultra mobile PC life 3 hours
• 2008 – Average ultra mobile PC life 3.6 hours
• 2009 – Average ultra mobile PC life 4.3 hours
• 2010 – Average ultra mobile PC life 5 hours.

Update: Feb 2015. I’ve extrapolated the prediction out further. Not mentioned above is the assumption that the battery size is 35Wh. 7-inch tablet PCs in 2015 have between 15 and 20Wh capacity.

• 2011 – Average ultra mobile PC life 6.2 hours
• 2012 – Average ultra mobile PC life 7.45 hours
• 2013 – Average ultra mobile PC life 9 hours
• 2014 – Average ultra mobile PC life 10.75 hours
• 2015 – Average ultra mobile PC life 13 hours.  (7.4 hours on a 20 Wh battery)

Lets put a marketing twist on those figures because just like all manufacturers do, we could use ‘minimum load’ figures:

• 2006 – Average ultra mobile PC life 4 hours
• 2007 – Average ultra mobile PC life 4.8 hours
• 2008 – Average ultra mobile PC life 5.75 hours
• 2009 – Average ultra mobile PC life 6.9 hours
• 2010 – Average ultra mobile PC life 8.3 hours.

..and hey presto – you reach the Intel target of all-day (another marketing twist of 8 hours!) of battery life by 2010.

I wonder how much the devices will cost in 2010 – we’ll leave that for another Carrypad prediction!

Steve/Chippy.

So I have been toying around with the idea of creating a game for the new ultra mobile PC and then it hit me, what the world really needed first was a ultra mobile PC Program Launcher theme creator and packager. (A game will happen a little later.)

So I started development on what is right now called the “Origami Theme Creator” (Not the final name, so other ideas are welcome)

Currently it more or less emulates the program manager icons in a 800×600 window and allows you to view all of the UI items in a “true to life” way.

For the icons that have multiple items there is currently a drop down box that allows you to select the different possible icons that need to be displayed. For example, there are 6 different wireless status icons and each can be displayed by selecting the correct one from a right click popup box.

[img]https://www.umpcportal.com/origami/images/origami_theme_select.jpg[/img]

Currently the network strength status and battery icon support these multiple icons.

Another feature is the background changer. I am currently using it to test some of the few [url=https://www.umpcportal.com/modules/xcgal/index.php?cat=7]Program Launcher backgrounds[/url] we have. It makes it easy too visualize what a background will look like on the launcher, however it is a little stretched out because the backgrounds are created at 1024×512.

As for developments left before release, I need to finish the specs on the XML file that will track all of the theme information and create functions for pulling the image data form multiple locations. Then the data will likely be saved in a zip file that can be uploaded and installed through the theme creator or by hand.

I will also likely be adding text color support for light and dark text before the first release.

I made a quick video of the functionality including background changing and button higlighting in our [url=https://www.umpcportal.com/modules/xcgal/displayimage.php?pid=81]Pics / Videos section[/url]. So, go check it out and give me any feedback for the program or ideas on items that should be included. Read the full story

According to an article on [url=http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20060419PR210.html]DigiTimes[/url] market sources were quoted as saying that Microsoft originally wanted to partner with VIA to help promote the UMPC. However they didn’t due to the fact that players like Samsung and Asus preferred Intel.

Also according to the article both VIA and Samsung have declined commenting on whether or not Samsung is really releasing a VIA based UMPC.

The only info that was given was from Samsung saying that they have no agreement with VIA.

The price of the Intel will need to come down if a VIA based Samsung device becomes available with the same specs. At that point only die hard Intel fans would even consider paying $400-$600 more for the same machine. Read the full story

According to [url=http://www.digitalmediaasia.com/default.asp?ArticleID=14946]Digital Media Asia[/url] VIA has confirmed that the Samsung Q1 will include a version with the VIA chip.

The VIA Q1 will include a C7-M microprocessor and VX700 chipset. Due to the cheaper price of the VIA processor the Q1 including it will be closer to $700 instead of the $1,200 price for the one with the Intel processor.

Read the full story

[Update: This is also known as the Paceblade Easybook P8.]

I thought that the smartpad journal entry had turned out to be a bit of a dead-loss (after hearing subsequently that it had been discontinued nearly 2 years ago!) but un unknown ‘Simone’ left an interesting comment on link on that post today to let me know about another umpc-like device.

The PMG quadpad from Tronic (and sold in Europe through Akori) has all the right ingredients. It runs on a VIA C3 processor (one generation older than the C7) but I can’t see anything in the spec list that puts it far outside of Origami territory. The 8.4″ screen is slightly bigger and the touch-pack software is missing but these are minor points. Manufacturers price appears to be over $2000 but Simone says its available for Euro1200. That still seems a bit high for a C3-based device considering its Origami competitors but it could be a 2005 price.
It supports screen rotation and has a PCMCIA slot which should satisfy those that want to add in their local flavour of mobile data interface.

Processor Via C3 Eden 1 GHz
Memory PC2100 DDR 512 MB DDR
Display 800 x 600 Touchscreen – Finger
Hard disk 2.5″ 40 to 80 GB
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Home or Professional

All the usual wired and wireless connectivity is there along with a 1.2kg weight and an ‘up to 3.5hr’ battery. A range of accessories is also available.

I’ve contacted the distributer to see if there’s a U.S. distribution partner and any plans for variations of the device (perhaps using a C7 processor.)

Perhaps we’ll have another ultra mobile PC on the market soon!

[Update: 15th April – Zupera Technology returned my email query for more information. The bad news is that they stopped producing this device a long time ago.]

Browsing back over some of my ‘draft’ blogs (of which there are many!) I found this article reference.

It dates from nearly 2 years ago and shows this little baby. Its the Zupera Technology Smartpad (nice name!) Zupera make industrial equipment but this doesnt look industrial to me.

Operating System – Windows CE.NET English Version
CPU – Intel PXA255 400MHz
Memory – 64MB Flash ROM, 128MB SDRAM
Display – 7″ TFT color screen 16 bits, resolution 800×480
Wireless Communcation – GPRS/CDMA 1Xmodule, 802.11b
Expansion SlotCompact – SD/MMC
Microphone – In-built microphone
Speaker – In-built stereo speaker
Keyboard – PS 2 interface keyboard
Video Output – VGA
Communications – Host USB A V 1.1; Mini USB B, V 1.1
Network Interface – RJ45,10M/100M
Serial Port – RS 232C
Power Supply – Rechargeable li-battery 3600mAH, replaceable
Dimensions – LxWxH = 215mm X 125mm X 28mm

You could call it a grown-up Pocket PC but with the VGA-output, USB host capablity and 7″ 800×480 screen, its not far removed from ultra mobile PC territory. Marketing-wise, this thing could go into the ultra mobile PC space at about 600 Euro. Its missing the keyboard but its oh-so-close to the Carrypad ideal spec! I like it!

Steve/Chippy.