We received a tip-off over the weekend that there were some real specs available for the E90. It turned out to be a set of Symbian statistics that, to be honest, were a little difficult for us to decode! We more your desktop OS kind of people you see but we’re willing to start taking Symbian on board especially if its now supporting an 800 wide screen. Ring Nokia analysed the same data and came up with some conclusions and mentioned 3GSM in a following breath.

The E90 is rumoured to have a clamshell design (which might be one of the reasons why the N800 didn’t get a keyboard) and a super-wide 800×352 screen. This could make a much more useable screen shape than VGA which, to be honest, it not ideal for web browsing or reading any sort of text for that matter.

It looks even more likely now that both the HTC Athena and E90 will get launches at 3GSM next week.

Guess which PC here has the 9 hour battery and which has the 2 hours battery life?

And guess which one is more useful on a flight? Now, don’t let anyone tell you that good battery life on a UMPC isn’t possible! Details about the Samsung Q1B here.

Hugo is off to China and it sounds like the Aussie Mobile Maniac is having a great time. More info here.

The Uren that VIA had at CES seems to have had another launch. Oh no. Wait. Its AMD’s turn now because this is the Uren A1, based on the Geode. Aving are reporting the local price – 700000 Korean Won ($750) making it around the same price as a Raon Digital Vega or Kohjinsha SA1.

The images are worth a look and now is probably a good time to release the info the Innowell sent us when we inquired a month ago. Apparently they will be bringing it in to Europe and the US and there’s an English language website being prepared.

Here’s the English language flyer they sent us which contains info on the VIA-based V1 and the AMD-based A1. Click to enlarge.

Full specifications of the V1 are in the product database.

Joost is a P2P-based TV service under beta test from the team that developed Skype (More details here). It looks fantastic on a UMPC. The word ‘killer’ comes to mind.

JKK has got hold of a Beta tester invite and gives us all a treat by making a video of it. We want we want we want….assuming the quality of the content is good enough!

Take a look at the video here.

The N800 appears to make a great, simple Videocalling device if this video by Thoughtfix is anything to go by. In it you’ll see Patrick Rhone being interviewed in acceptable quality. The transport used is Gtalk but Gtalk doesn’t support video so how does it work? Well, thanks to this great blog post, we can see that its using a Nokia plug-in that enables video over the XMPP (Jabber) protocol. There’s also a PC-based client that can be downloaded so that you can communicate with Windows XP users. It would be nice to think that this video over jabber protocol fits with existing jabber-based solutions but this is still an unknown. Skype will be introduced on the N800 very soon (March, along with Rhapsody support we hear) and so it will be interesting to see if the video component of Skype has been ported.

I understand that there’s logistics and manpower to be considered here but I feel a little let down. CeBit gave me access to a CeBit press area on their website but now won’t give me a press pass. I’ve been blocked out because I’m an online minion. A speck of paper dust in the great printing press of real journalists. And before anyone stumbling across this post thinks ‘Stop moaning and do some training like a normal hard-working member of the press you online minion. You speck of dust you’ let me outline my case.

In Feb 2006, Carrypad was a blog about UMPCs, then it was a better blog, then it turned into a portal and then the portal got bigger and better. 1 million pages were viewed and by the time CES 2007 came around, 700 articles had been written about UMPCs and a partner portal had been bought out.  Today, Carrypad is registered as a company and will be continuing to work on UMPC portals full-time just like one of those ‘Man earns living from Blogging’ articles you see in the Sunday press. Its not just a little blog anymore you see. And now, the organisers of the event that kicked-off the UMPC market in 2006 and listed UMPCs above HDTV in their 2006 trends roundup, won’t give a press pass to the person that does as much research, news, reporting on UMPCs as anyone else in the world. (except possibly Ctitanic who, some say, has fourteen arms!) If CES can accommodate the bloggers in such a good way  (its poetic that one of the most successful blogging setups at CES was called the BlogHaus!) then what’s different over here? If anything I would expect less bloggers to go to CeBit and the admin to be less of an overhead than at CES.

Thoughtfix has run through a comparison of the Porient H9 and the other RISC ARM based tablet, the Nokia Internet Tablet. There’s a remarkable number of similarities in one of those Chinese copy kind of ways that makes you think twice about whether they have an honest marketing plan! It could be that, just like many other UMPCs, we’re looking at the OEM ‘naked’ version and that when you see this packaged with a UMPC-tailored navigation solution, official Maemo community support and a hot brand, the whole package will look a lot different.  Out of respect for anyone that’s confident enough to step into the UMPC market right now, we’ll be adding it to the product database and keeping a close eye on it.

Update: Its in the product database now.

With some small changes, this could impact UMPC designs.

Intel have announced Tolapai, an integrated CPU, North and Southbridge similar to the AMD Geode and VIA CoreFusion packages.  The information from HKEPC indicates that its targeting small embedded solutions but looking at the power requirements and the lack of any built-in VGA support, we doubt this version will have much impact in the UMPC market.

Here’s a schematic.

Click to enlarge. Source: HKEPC.

It is an indication that Intel is only one step away from having a variant of this which integrates the GPU and if they improve the power requirements (Tolapai uses only ‘Low Power’ Pentium rather than ‘Ultra Low Power’ Pentium chip design) it will be possible to use this in smaller UMPC designs. 

Tolapai is due for shipping late 2007 and its one to watch out for along with VIA ‘John’ CoreFusion and the new AMD Geode LX900.

Thanks to Arqion for the tip.