According to Intel, 4 more McCaslin based UMPCs will launch at IDF next month. I’ve talked about one that is high on the probability list but lets talk about the others now. There’s a gaming design, a carPC design, an educational PC and a couple of unknowns including one that just looks like its a styling exercise. Notice how there’s little overlap in the usage model of the devices. Intel would have chosen their candidate designs carefully to maximize customer spread and to ensure that designs can be licensed out without the licensee worrying too much about competition. Note that some or even all of the designs that launch next month could be vastly different than these but I would say there’s a high probability that you’ll see at least similar form factors and similar target customer types. There one important customer type missing though. Have a read through and see what customer type (its a big one) is not represented here.
I took delivery of one of the TabletKiosk MP3400 battery pack units last week and have just kicked off a test that I think is going to last for nearly 10 hours!
I’ve connected it to a fully charged Kohjinsha SA1 which, with its 29W/hr battery, should last for about 3 hours in this test. The 56W/hr of the battery pack should, however, power it for 6 hours before the UMPC battery kicks-in.
The test scenario is fairy heavy on the battery as I’m running the Kohjinsha with 50% screen, WiFi on, no power-saving features turned on and its playing a 2mbps DivX non-stop. Under normal operation I get 3.5 hours on the Kohjinsha so that would equate to 10 hours normal mobility with the batt. pack.
Captain of Handtops has just completed some testing on the Flipstart and included the Battery Eater battery life test.
The total time to deplete the battery from 99.9% was around 2 and 1/4 hours.
That’s quite good when you look at other UMPC results that are available. For example the Q1 only manages around 1 and 3/4 hours. As a general rule of thumb, multiply the battery eater life by 1.4 to get an average usage value. Using this we see that the Flipstart will run for over 3 hours. I’m trying to find out what the capacity of the large battery is to work out exactly if the device is efficient or just has a very fat battery stuck on its bottom!
For comparison, The Q1 Ultra with its McCaslin platform and new screen is showing something like 3.5 hours under normal use (battery capacity is around 31W/hr) which is pretty good. Engineers at CeBIT mentioned that the CPU component of McCaslin uses 50% of the power of the previous platform (Pentium-M presumably.) I wonder how the Flipstart will look after the April 18th announcement of 4 more McCaslin-based UMPCs.
TabletKiosk have updated their website and included the pricing for the eo TufTab v7112XT
Its $1699 with Windows XP Tablet or Vista pre-installed or you can have it for $75 less with SuSE Linux installed. Its due to be available in Mid April.
New images have also been posted showing the device thickness, the port bays and the 4-cell battery.
Have you seen any of the Charbax CeBIT videos? You really must. When I saw the first one I was turned off. They were too fast and annoying but now I’ve watched a few more I have changed my mind. They are still too fast and jarring but I see what Charbax is doing. He’s blasting as many questions as possible to the interviewee and seeing what comes back. Invariably, you get really good snippets of info coming out. Great job Charbax! Take the Hanbit interview for example. In it you’ll hear the Pepper Pad 4 mentioned, Slingbox and even Skype video support. There’s a mention of design changes on the PP4 and even of lawyers looking into the issue of the Q1 Ultra keyboard to see if there are any patent infringements. Well they would be silly not to check that out wouldn’t they.
I also had a meeting with Hanbit and was able to give them my opinions about how the Pepper Pad 3 should change for the next version. I told them that the design needs to be hardened up so that developers get more interested, that the edges of the device could be shrunk down by probably 10mm on each side, that its too heavy, that the pen should be moved from the front, that the screen quality could be better and that I’d like to see a mouse pointer button. I told them to consider bringing the digital audio out onto a connector, offering S-video (y/c) video out and thinking about the LX900. I told them that if the design was made less feminate it might attract more developers and that they should further incubate a bigger community by offering subsidized models to people active in the community. On the software side I told them that complete Skype and IM support was needed along with UPnP, CIF/SMB support, Bluetooth DUN and A2DP and that the home window look needs a re-design. Its not stylish at all. Too many clashing colours and an icy background.
As it turns out, I needn’t have said much at all. Hanbit and Pepper know about all these things and, as you’ll see in Charbax’s video, and as I heard in the meeting, they are working on most of these features. The Pepper Pad 4 is likely to be a refinement of the Pepper Pad theme with continuing use of the split keyboard layout and an AMD processor running the Pepper software. Hanbit agree that the white version needs a big makeover (pen, grey rubber not attractive) and that it needs to be slimmed down slightly. Skype video support is high on the software list (I guess this is something that will come for the Pepper Pad 3 too) and pricing will remain competitive. Hanbit/Pepper sound like they are aiming for the sub $500 price as soon as they can and I believe its possible.
I now have a black Pepper Pad 3 and I’m even more happy with it now. I would never have taken the white one out with me but (if it had BT DUN support) I would definitely take the black one out and feel comfortable. I noticed that they keys have slightly changed from the early white version that I had. They are slightly less raised and have a softer feel. The touchscreen issues have gone too. Its already getting better!
Existing Pepper owners should expect at least two software releases this year with some significant changes coming in the release planned for Q3.
Joe over at OnlyUMPC has just pinged me to let me know that TabletKiosk have just launched their eo TufTab v7112XT
The specifications are mostly unchanged from the OEM model with the highlights being a 1.2 VIA C7-M, fingerprint reader, PCMCIA slot and top-mounted stylus. I had a chance to see and hold a non-working version of this at CeBIT and its certainly not a consumer device. ‘Functional’ is the word I would use. I’ve also spoken to others who have used pre-production versions of the device. One of them said it ran quite hot (could have been a pre-production issue) and the other said that the screen was really good. I didn’t really detect any degree of excitement in their reports though but that’s the way of industrial PC’s I guess. The only really interesting thing is that they will be offering Linux as an option. It will be interesting to see if they get the drivers working for all the hardware. Assuming its all open source, the distro could be used on other devices.
This is one of the devices I was looking at for a project later in the year that will require a semi-rugged solution but I was hoping for a flash HDD. Having dropped my Kohji from about 30cm and killed the hard drive I would like to know how the rotating drive in this survives the IP53 drop test from 75cm.
Availability is Mid-April and price is not yet announced. Mid-April. This is the date that the Medion, OQO Model 02 and Amtek T770 are supposed to be available. They are all VIA-based devices running Vista so maybe VIA are still working on drivers?
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 UMPC 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.
One of the people I met at CeBIT was JKK from JKKMobile. In fact we spent a fair bit of time together either roaming the halls taking videos or discussing UMPCs over German beers. He’s posted most of his videos to YouTube now but here’s one of them that I wanted to present in higher quality. Its the very good looking US700 series which was being shown. The HQ version is over at Stage6 videos (DivX format.) LQ version is below.
The rest of the videos are on JKK’s pages at YouTube and include the Samsung Q1 Ultra (showing some Navigation software,) Gigabyte U60 (which is still to go through some development before its launched.) and the Amtek T770 (which feels like a very well built UMPC.)
