I can’t seem to get away from this obsession with power utilisation on UMPC’s. Its worrying me! I might have to take my mind off it with one of these babies.
Liquid cooled. Low power. Great for complex calculations.

However, until I get to the bottom of this issue…..

Ctitanic broke the news that he’s only getting 1.5 hours from an Eo battery and that PCMark and 3Dmark tests results were very bad.

The processing power tests are a bit suspect but we should always expect the VIA to underperform against the Celeron. Espicially for 3d graphics.
The battery life figure suprised me the most though.

A group of us are currently collaborating on tests, ideas and discussion about the problem to identify if there is a real issue here. If so, we’ll need to go back to Tablet Kiosk and get some action becuase as it stands currently, people are getting some very bad battery life figures.

Before diving into the problem with the battery life, I went over my pre-launch power analysis for errors to see if i’d missed anything but all the cross-checks I can do seem to be OK. The battery life issues being reported look like a real problem.

To re-cap slightly, I predicted 18watts at full-load for a ultra mobile PC (and 14 watts for a VIA following Van Smiths C7-M ULV test results ) and as a starting point, lets note that the battery capacity on the Eo is 26W/hrs.

Ctitanic’s figures (below 1.5 hours playing a Divx video file) suggest a power-drain of nearly 18 watts. Thats much more than I expected and in fact more power drain that Van Smith got on a 12″ 1.5ghz VIA C7-M laptop. How can we explain that one?

More posts on the forum followed!

In the meantime, I went back over Van Smiths VIA C7-M ULV review and then contacted him. He very kindly offered some tips. Firstly, that we should be using COSBI OpenSourceMark to check and compare processing power. He’s worked on more than one benchmarking application and knows his stuff so I trust him on that one.
Secondly, he explained how we could check the speed-stepping was working correctly. Finally he suggested that the CPU might not be entering low-power states due to BIOS or other reasons (specifically a USB device might be preventing it. Apparently its a common problem.)

Firstly Ctitanic checked the stepping – its is working on his device. Then he ran the COSBI OpenSourceMark tests. The results tell a different story. Much better for the VIA. Then Ctitanic found through ‘perfmon’ that the CPU was not switching into C3 power-saving states. Even at idle.
To ensure that the USB wasn’t the cause, Ctitanic ran the video again from the HD. This made no difference. But why was the device not going into C3 power-saving state at idle? The reson for this is still unknown. We’ve got a few more tests to run there.

Having seen that speed-stepping was working, we went back to the issue of Divx run times. Ctitanic ran some more tests which showed that the CPU was running at 75% with WinDVD player with the VIA optimisations turned on. (55% with VLC player which is an interesting result.) It was clear that the ultra mobile PC was running close to full power running the video which explains why there was no power-saving going on with the CPU. At that point I remembered that the VN800 doesnt have any Mpeg-4 hardware optimisations and therefore the CPU utilisation was to be expected.

A quick Unichrome re-cap…
…that is part of the VN800 chipset (that accompanies the VIA C7-M ULV processor.) straight from the VIA website:

The VIA UniChrome Pro IGP graphics core also integrates the Chromotion CE Video Display Engine featuring an MPEG2 Decoder, Adaptive De-Interlacing, Video Deblocking, and a comprehensive range of hi-def outputs.

So, the key point there is that the VN800 can only decode MPEG2 in hardware (and therefore gain a power advantage.) Given a MPEG-2 stream from, say, a DVD VOB or relaying the Divx through a VLC server, converting to MPEG-2 and picking the stream up via Wifi (If that works, it could be a good trick for VIA ultra mobile PC owners when at home.) you should see the C7-M drop into power-saving and low-clockrate settings bringing a big power-saving advantage. (I know – it doesnt really help for on-the-move video watching though. I wouldn’t like to have to convert and carry MPEG2 films either. There are versions of the VIA chipset that have MPEG-4 hardware decoding so lets look forward to that!)

But we’re still left with the two problems
1 – Why is Ctitanics Eo draining more power than a 1.5ghz laptop with 12″ screen?
2 – Why arent we seeing the processor drop into power saving modes at idle.

Further testing going on at the moment:
– Disable USB bus (if possible) from the BIOS.
– Contact Tablet Kiosk and raise a ticket.
– Measure current drain from the battery during full-power optimisations.
– Measure playback performance / drain with screen off.

We want to test these possible theories:
– The BIOS requires updating to support the power-saving modes of the CPU.
– A built-in USB device is being polled preventing the CPU from entering power-saving states.
– The battery is sub-standard.
– The battery or bios reaches low-power capacity trigger before the battery is empty.
– There’s something else in the hardware thats draining the power. (Cheap LCD screen is one possibility.)

Keep tuned or feeback at the Origamiportal forum where we’re exchanging new information as we go along.

Thanks so far to Ctitanic, Marix, Van Smith and JeffGr who are all contributing.

If TabletKiosk are reading, please can you contact me via email or in the forums. Maybe we can work on this together.

Until later… Steve / Chippy.

[url=http://www.newspaperdirect.com/]NewspaperDirect[/url] announced in a press release today that through a relationship with Microsoft they will be offering their newspapers on demand service to the ultra mobile PC devices.

NewspaperDirect has a large offering of newspapers available for download (a [url=http://www.newspaperdirect.com/newspapers/titles.aspx]full list can be found here[/url]) and allows you to download the news to your computer for viewing while on the go.

The company also runs a website called [url=http://www.pressdisplay.com]PressDisplay.com[/url] which allows you to view popular newspapers online in a news print format.

Full press release below… Read the full story

[url=http://www.gamespress.com/]GamesPress.com[/url] posted a press release late last week stating that the [url=http://nuclide.com]Nuclide[/url] developed game called Hammer Heads will be shown on the Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) devices in the Microsoft booth (booth #1246) at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles next week.

Nuclide Games announced the game last year and has apparently adapted it to the new device.

As far as I know this is the first third party game that has been announced for the system besides [url=http://www.popcap.com/press/index.php?page=press_releases&release=Origami_3-09-06]Bejeweled 2 and Zuma[/url] being installed on some of the systems.

More info about the game can be found on Nuclide’s website [url=http://nuclide.com/games/gnomes.html]here[/url]

The premise of the game is also sad to me as I was starting work on a Wack-A-Mole game which is very similar to a Wack-A-Gnome game. Who knows, maybe there’s still room for two of the same types of game.

Read the full press release below… Read the full story

I promise i’m not really obsessed with battery life and power utilisation on UMPC’s but ever since I made predictions I’ve been interested to see how close i’ve been.

Today, it appears I missed the mark with my predictions on battery life while watching films. Not just by a little bit, but by a whole hour! Ctitanic posted the results of his film duration test in his blog and he says that he only got 1:25 with wifi off, BT off, 50% brightness and playing from Flash disk.
This is even worse than the rather dissapointing result of 2hrs that came from a Japanese report.

I mentioned it to VIA a few weeks back and I was told that to extend the battery life and get the most advantage out of the VIA’s unichrome video chipset while watching a film, you need to use a player that is optimised for the VIA platform. WinDVD and PowerDVD are two examples. If you’re running linux already (anyone?) then there’s a VIA-supported and optimised version of Xine available.

It remains to be seen what the advantage of these programs will be but i’m a bit sceptical now that we’re going to reach 2.5 hours for a film. It also calls into question the rest of the battery life predictions. I’ll be watching closely for more test results. specifically, these tests:

• Watching a film with screen off (!) and calculating the screen power drain.
• Battery capacity testing (do the batteries need conditioning?)
• Checking cpu utilisation during fim watching with and without a VIA-optimised video player.

If anyone can, is planning or has run these tests, let me know and we’ll see if we can work out the best ultra mobile PC setup for video watching and some final real-world battery life results. Or maybe I should just ignore battery life altogether as the ‘low battery’ warning has just popped up on my laptop here. Its a sign!

Regards
Steve / Chippy.

Jeff Angelo sent us a link to DualCor’s website showing the CPC and apparently solidifying it as a UMPC.

According to the info at [url=http://www.dualcor.com/umpc.php]http://www.dualcor.com/umpc.php[/url] the DualCor is going to be running both Windows XP Tablet/Edition 2005 and Windows Mobile 5.0. so that will be giving it an advantage over other ultra mobile PC devices as it will be able to run software for both platforms.

It also has both an Intel PXA263 400 MHz Embedded Processor and a VIA C7-M 1.5 GHz x86 Processor included for each of the systems.

One interesting difference is that the DualCor has a 5 inch screen instead of the 7 inch screen that all of the other ultra mobile PC devices have been seen with. But since it comes with the Microsoft Touch Pack as well, it must be of official Microsoft Specs.

As far as I can tell there is no release date yet, so hopefully there will be more info soon. Read the full story

Thanks to our friends at The Tablet Store for understanding my terrible German and confirming availability and price info for the Paceblade Easybook P7 and for providing us with the first confirmation of a retailer, dates and end-user prices for the German market.

As previously reported, the Easybook P7 European manufacturers price will be 1090,- Euro. The Tablet Store tell us that the German launch date is 22nd May

The Tablet Store will be selling for an inclusive price of 1250,- Euro.

Regards
Steve / Chippy.

Und auf Deutsch:
Das Paceblade Easybook P7 ultra mobile PC wird in Deutschland erst ab dem 22. Mai 2006 verfügbar sein. Endkundenpreis liegt bei 1090 zzgl. MwSt.
Es wird bei The Tablet PC Store (Muenchen, Deutschland) für 1250,- Euro incl. MwSt. angeboten.

Danke an The Tablet Store.

Steve / Chippy.

I’ve just read a very good article on the Linuxdevices.com website written by David Wood, co-founder and executive vice president of research at Symbian. David talks about convergance and how the migration of applications is tending towards smartphones and why smartphones have been a success. David is obviously somewhat biased being a leading figure in Smartphone OS developement but I concur with pretty much all he says and dont class the article as just propoganda.

In the Carrypad journal, I have already written about a lot of what David has said in the (pdf) convergance diagram and journal entry I made back in Feb. So the reason for this journal entry is not just to link and promote Davids and my ideas, but to learn from some of the important things that David has written and try to apply them to the ultra mobile PC market.

Important points to consider.
There are 4 points in his article that are very relevant.

Smartphones are an evolution of an existing device that is already highly popular

What can we say about the UMPC? There’s two angles. Firstly, we could assume that the ultra mobile PC is a new device in a new segment. In that case, the ultra mobile PC needs to have a lot of developement and evolution. Secondly, we could assume that theultra mobile PC is the evolution of a not-too-popular tablet PC or PocketPC/PDA. On this point, i’m afraid the ultra mobile PC fails. We need to consider the ultra mobile PC as a new device in a new segment for it to move forward.

Mobile phones have been steadily improving in functionality, while (on the whole) retaining their core simplicity and utility.

UMPCs devices are in their early stages and so the improvement still needs to happen. However, the important point here is that mobile phones have core simplicity and utility. This is where I believe that Microsoft made a big mistake with their UMPC. They took a complex operating system, with all it’s hardware requirements and heavyweight do-it-all user interface and squeezed it into a consumer marketed package. That, in my eyes, was very wrong. Not only becuase they committed themselves to a tough hardware spec. but also becuase simplicity is key to consumer success. Microsoft should know that by now. They’ve been burned before and they don’t seem to be learning. A half-hearted touch-pack software layer is not the answer.
Simplicity is a nut that still needs to be cracked with UMPC’s. It won’t be done with a desktop-version of XP and it won’t be done with a desktop version of Linux. In fact, it won’t be done with any desktop operating system at all. It needs someone to take a core system and build a dedicated user interface around it. Microsoft have done it with Windows Mobile 5 and maybe they should have come in from that direction by re-developing it and offering native Word and Excel document support. They could have sat it on top of an Xscale processor architecture and ended up with a far more efficient platform. Nokia seem to be doing the right thing. They’ve taken a core Linux kernel and reduced distribution and are wrapping a dedicated user interface around it. Its not perfect by a long shot yet but look at the price point they have achieved by using that method. Here in Europe I can buy 4 Nokia internet tablets for the price of a UMPC! That gives Nokia a lot of price headroom in wich to bring out an updated product.

David uses the failed Apple Newton as an example in his next point. He says that the Newton was too expensive (I’ve heard this comment somewhere else recently!) and that smartphones used a price subsidy model to help get over this problem.

The lower purchase cost of mobile phones to end users means they are much more affordable than the Newton. One reason for the lower cost price is a business model that was never feasible for a device such as the Newton: operators frequently subsidise part of the purchase price

Subsidising the cost of these pieces of leading edge technology (they’re not running at high Ghz but the thermodynamic problems associated with ultra mobile PC requires leading edge technology.) is an option that needs to be considered and is, in-fact, possible. Origami’s have a screen-size advantage over smartphones which means that they’re able to offer video/tv capabilities that can not, because of current physical constraints, be migrated to smartphones. The Newton had no feature that allowed a subsidy model to work but with UMPC’s we have Video and TV content available to us. Can you imagine the ad targeting that can be done by a TV/IP provider knowing the location of its end device and its google profile? Its an advertisiers dream. Actually its probably Googles dream. The biggest hurdle here however is content rights. The distribution technology (internet) is pretty much in place but its only the real heavyweight players that will be able to offer the content and if they do, they’ll have a business model that no-one else will be able to match. Apple are sitting in a very comfortable position right now with regard to UMPC’s and content.

The huge size of the mobile phone industry means that strong learning effects and economies of scale operate, driving down costs even further

This is a simple one. Once, the device starts getting good market momentum, research momentum increases, the sales predictions rise and production volumes go up resulting in good economies. At this point in time, a few other factors also contribute to cost reductions. Competition, consumer education and content availability. The whole machine starts to turn at a very fast pace and not much more effort is required to oil it.

The rest of the article is also worth reading. David goes on to talk about Ipod functionality being migrated to the smartphone and lists a number of other migrating applications. Ipod fans won’t like that bit and although its technology possible, the ipod is a not just a device, its a technology, software and content suite that needs to be replicated with mobile phone carriers before it happens.

A message to marketing managers!
I’m not a marketing expert so I could be missing important points here but taking what Daivd has highlighted and adding my interpretations, here are some ultra mobile PC marketing tips to help achieve mass-market consumer success.

(1) UMPC’s need constant development. Don’t give up at the first hurdle. (2) UMPC’s need to be simple – Don’t build them on top of desktop operating systems. To help achieve the critical mass, a subsidy model is needed. Sell through channels that will add video/TV content to the mix and subsidise the purchase cost.
You won’t see smartphone levels of sales (there’s only one device format that you can take everyhere!) but you could reach that important critical mass.

Thanks to David Wood for some good pointers. I hope someone is listening to him (or me!) out there and David, if you’re reading this, i’d love to hear your views on the ultra mobile PC market. How about enhancing the Symbian plaform to cover the requirements of a ultra mobile PC device? Maybe Nokia will use it for their next tablet device!

Steve / Chippy.

The ultra mobile PC product portal gets many daily updates, tweaks and enhancements but yesterday, we finished setting up a really useful ultra mobile PC product tracking feature thats worth posting about.

Using a normal RSS 2.0 feed reader, you can now subscribe to updates from all or any of the products in the ultra mobile PC product database. Currently, the feed includes reviews, comment, rumor, pricing and availbility links that we add into add the product datasheet from our hand-picked sources. (Many of these are in our link list.) Soon it will be enhanced to include manufacturers pricing and availability information. All links are reviewed and only added if relevant so you can be sure of a quality (although possibly not the fastest-available) feed.

The all-product RSS feed is available via Feedburner. Go to the product pages to see the individual product RSS feed links. It looks stable from here but if you see any issues, let us know.

If you have important product-related links that you think should have been published (give us 48hours to capture new links) or you run a good source of information that you think we should be tracking or adding to our link list contact us and we’ll do our best. email to productupdates@carrypad.com
Links and sites need to be relevant to the ultra mobile PC market which we, at Carrypad, define as a portable computer at 1kilo or less with a screen size between 5″ and 10″. There are of course exceptions to this rule. One of which could be the Sharp Zaurus CL3200 which is now being imported into Europe. We’ll be reviewing this device in the next week or so to find out if it’s worthy of going into the product database!

Regards
Steve / Chippy.