The title sounds a bit like a school playground boast doesn’t it – “and my Dads got a Ferrari. And it goes 500 miles an hour.” – but I think I’ve found my 1500,- Euro ‘Carrypad Office companion’ that I was talking about recently.
Its been quite a simple choice as it all boiled down to whether a docking station was available. The eo 7110/easybook P7 was at the top of the list just waiting for a docking station to complete the requirements but last week, Tablet Kiosk knocked it off the top spot with the announcement of the 7200 series. The UX series had been near the top but the cost was too high and the screen too small.
The biggest problem was actually finding a supplier for the device in Germany. This is a problem that occurs often in Europe. Although there’s close to half a billion people here, there’s something like 20 official languages and a heap of red tape to get through to be able to sell something here. Consequently, devices are always delayed and sometimes never ever make it. Fortunately Tablet Kiosk have a partnership in the UK with Pocket PC solutions so I was able to contact them to confirm they could ship into Germany. Then, during conversations about UMPC’s with Coxion in Finland, they mentioned that they were buying some 7200 series units for testing and assessment, well, to cut a long story short, I’ll be buying one on a no-support basis through Coxion. As I’ll probably pop the lid within the first week, that’s fine by me.
The i7210 has a few issues (I can’t see any way to use the hi-def 7.1 channel audio on the device. The 80gm touchscreen might be too sensitive for me. Is there a built in mic? Will the Pentium perform efficiently? I’m worried that the pointer ‘pad’ won’t be as nice as a pointer ‘stick.’) but, as a mobile office companion, its as good as it gets for the price point.
What I am looking forward to is the dual-screen output when docked, (800×480 on the ultra mobile PC and 1200×1024 on an LCD screen is a lot of screen space!) the S-Video output (this might replace my pvr.) getting a wall-mount, (its got standard VESA mounting holes) and opening it up to see if I can retro fit a DVB-T digital TV receiver back into it (the Asian versions of this device have a DVB-H receiver in them. I assume its just a USB-bus device.)
There will be plenty of reports up on Carrypad when I’ve got the device at the end of August (fingers crossed.) I’d be interested to hear from existing founder/ecs/daewoo ultra mobile PC owners out there so if you’ve already got one, drop me a line.
Regards
Steve / Chippy
