[url=http://ultramobilepc-tips.blogspot.com]CTitanic[/url] has posted a link on our forums to a story on [url=http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/pcupdate/articles/0604/17/news003.html]plusd.itmedia.co.jp[/url] that includes a specs benchmark table and info about the PaceBlade SmartCaddie.

First and likely the most ineresting info is the table they had displayed on their site with the benchmark data.

They started with a SmartCaddie running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 with the VIA C7-M ULV 1GHz. It had 512MB (DDR2-533) Memory installed and a 40 GB Hard Drive. The Battery installed for the specs was a Lithium ion (2400mAh).

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

They used HDBench to run the tests and have info on the Disk Read and Write speeds, Memory Read and Write speeds, graphics specs and also CPU data.

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

This is the first site I have seen talk about battery life as well. According to their tests they ran a video from Gya-O and web browsing with the screen brighness at about 50% and the battery lasted less than 2 hours. And when doing the test with the screen brigtness set lower than normal they were able to get it to go a little over 2 hours.

During their application tests they said the speed was really good with Email and doc writing, though obviously 3D applications are a little slow.

Good information on the evalutation units. hopefully we can get more benchmarks like this released in the near future as more people get the devices. Read the full story

We’ve just had confirmation through Carrypad and Paceblade Europe that the European version of the Smart Caddie is planned for launch in the 2nd Week in May and will be called the [b]Paceblade Easybook P7[/b]

Because of delays on the Intel versions of UMPC’s and the production issues with the EO, that could make it the first ultra mobile PC available in Europe.

We’ve been in touch with the European sales office of Paceblade in Munich and here’s the details we have.

The EasyBook P7 ultra mobile PC is scheduled to arrive the second week of May.
End-customer price will be € 1090,– net,
black or white finish with 40GB HDD and 512MB DDR2 memory, 2 yr. Pick-up-and-return warranty.

Technical specs should match the Tablet Kiosk Eo device as its also confirmed to be the same hardware.

If you’re in Europe, watch out for details from your local [url=http://www.paceblade.nl/site/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=7&tabid=160&otabid=12&modid=712&item=33]sale partners[/url]

Read the full story

I’ve been in contact with Paceblade this afternoon after reading some information on the German release of the Smart Caddie ultra mobile PC device.
It will be called the Paceblade Easybook P7 and i’ve posted a news article over at Origamiportal with the details.

As i’m based in Germany and the European head office is in Germany, i’ll try to remain in contact. More info will be posted as we get it.

After the news came out that the Samsung Q1 would be released in Korea on May 1st there was a lot of news around the internet saying that date was a worldwide release.

Well Maverick just made a post on our forums [url=https://www.umpcportal.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=263]here[/url] stating that after calling Samsung they confirmed that the device will not be available in the US or the UK until the first week of June.

This adds onto [url=https://www.umpcportal.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=171&forum=1&post_id=980#forumpost980]another post[/url] Maverick posted earlier about the device possibly having two released versions, the first ones without GPS/DMB support and another release in July with these options.

Great to get some a little better release date info about this device, so thanks Maverick for doing some calling.
Read the full story

[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