I had a chance to look at the ARM-based H9 ‘UMPC’ from the Beijing Peace East Technology Development Company (AKA Porient which is the name we’ll use from now on because it could save significant amounts of energy!!!) and here’s a few thoughts, some images and a video.
From the outside it looks OK. Its light, fairly robust and appears to be made of good quality plastics. The screen is bright and the screen/frame ratio is attractive. On the frame are dedicated app buttons on the left (GPS, browser and a programmable button) and some control buttons on the right. Down the right hand side of the unit is a scroll wheel with push-to-select, power socket, USB, headphone and TV-out sockets. There’s an SD, PCMCIA and standby/lock button on the top and a GPS aerial on the back. Battery life is high at 5 hours. In the video you’ll hear me ask about WiFi. Its not built in. No Bluetooth either. Its all accessed through modules in the PCMCIA slot which we know is a problem for consumers. Raon Digital’s Vega is a case in point. The SD card slot is also available though so at least there are some options.
The software seems fairly well presented but as it was in Chinese it was extremely difficult to test anything out. There’s really no telling how good the browser is, what the Linux distribution is or how fast it is without spending more time with it. An English version of the software is, apparently, available but was not available for CeBIT.
Pricing is also difficult to determine due to the huge variations in distribution costs for different countries and software requirements. Having talked about local market (China) pricing of around 750 Euro ($1000) it looks like its sitting at the low-end of the market which is not surprising considering the platform. Test production is going through now and if testing goes well, full production will start at the end of this month. If you’re considering distributing this outside China, you’ll be pleased to know that Porient will put it through certification.
All-in-all, this doesn’t really look like a complete ultra mobile PC solution to me. Its possible that someone could take the platform and re-develop the software into quite a nice navigation solution but as it stands, its going to need a fair bit of work to get this distributed outside China.
Gallery including an image of the brochure is available.
Full specification sheet and further related links.
YouTube video is below. A high quality version is available through Stage6 (DivX format)
