Its been a nice day for UMPCs. There was the Pepperpad 3 news, then the IDF ultra mobile PC prototype, the ASUS R2h launch and then my new i7210 turned up. I ordered it through the Scandinavian TabletKiosk distributor Coxion in Finland (who are also developing another mobile PC, the WebBook 3G.) They aren’t selling devices direct to the public but are providing mobile-computing related professional services into Europe. For those of you wanting to buy a single i7200 series in Scandinavia, I’ll try and find out from Coxion who’s reselling […]

Exactly as planned, the R2H has just been officially launched for the German and Austrian market at a press conference in Munich. Its taken way too long to get here (six months in total.) but at last we can finally be sure of pricing and specifications for the European markets. What do we want to know? Specs, Availability and Price, right? Specs: – 7 inch TFT WVGA Display (Auflösung: 800 x 480 Bildpunkte)– Interface Touch Panel & Pen– ULV Intel® Celeronâ„¢ M 900 MHz Prozessor – 768 MB DDR2-533 (256 MB onboard […]

More information has come through on the keynote speech by Intel CEO Paul Otellini at the IDF. Firstly, the complete keynote speech is available here. UMPC-related stuff starts at around the 50 min’s point. You’ll hear Anand Chandrasekher, GM of the Ultra Mobile Group at Intel, talk about the Steeley processor. The Steeley processor will be the successor to the Celeron-M with a Merom-based (65nm process) reduced-cache version of the Yonah1 single-core processor that itself will replace the Pentium-M range. Quite what the name of the chip will be is […]

In about 5 hours (1700 CET, 1100 EDT) we should know the official specifications, pricing and availability of the ASUS R2H in Germany. Already we’re seeing online prices appearing between 895 and 970 Euros so its coming in at about 15% below the current German price of the lower specification Samsung Q1.   Online retailers are offering the following specification which seems to be the same as the full specification as announced back in April/May (rather than the cut-down version being sold in Holland.) The included maps could be nice. One of the […]

Update: Chuma (chuma.org) has already got his and is starting to post some opinions: The new Pad 3 hardware – based on the AMD Geode LX800 platform – runs circles around the old XScale architecture. It’s SERIOUSLY FASTER. I don’t know how I can stress this enough.   The $699 Pepperpad 3 is due to start shipping in 3 days time (according to amazon.com) and already there’s a teaser article out there by someone who’s been testing it out. John Biggs of CrunchGear has had one for a week now […]

The Japanese ultra mobile PC customer now has another Sony UX to choose from because Sony have decided to offer 32GB of flash and 1GB of RAM in the Sony UX90/32SS/1 The price is high of course (around $500 premium over the 16GB version) but you get ruggedness, less heat and a significant speed increase over the spinning disk models and of course, a reasonable amount of storage space. Dynamism are already taking pre-orders for imports along with the other 13 variants of the device. Choices choices. Steve /Chippy. View […]

Update: A CNET video of the prototype ultra mobile PC show below is now available. (Via jkOnTheRun.) A few interesting bits of UMPC-related news have come out of the Intel Developers Forum in the last 24 hours. Firstly, Intel have said that they will be able to get the power usage of their mobile CPU’s down to 2.5W by the first half of 2007. (I assume that this is the Ultra Low Voltage Merom devices that are planned for Q1 2007. See the ultra mobile PC CPU update for more.) […]

[img]http://www.origamiportal.com/uploads/img4519a88535b8d.jpg[/img]

Anandtech had a writeup of the keynote for this falls IDF. Origami related info located [url=http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2840&p=8]here.[/url]

And now an exciting summary!

The umpc was on the list of subjects for the first days keynote. Above is the overly generic roadmap for the next few years of device development. Intels objectives at this point are power consumption and physical processor size, both of which should help with a number of problems facing the first generation devices. Also demonstrated was a new device prototype featuring a custom UI and Volkswagon sync capabilities. Nothing to exciting but good to see some progress and plans by one of the bigger players in the game.

Until next month,

–Marix :-x