I bought one of these last month and managed to get 10 hours life out of my Kohjinsha SA1 with it. Its good. Really good. It will power most UMPCs, it powers my mobile phone and even looks good. How many batteries look good?

Kerry Woo has published a full review at Gear Diary which is miles more detailed than mine! Worth a read through if you’re considering buying one of these from Tekkeon or TabletKiosk

Via GottaBeMobile

In the Origamiproject.com forums today, I read that Jacksonian was researching the new UMPC release schedule. Although now might not be the best time to make a decision (there will be an announcement on April 18th about new UMPCs) it’s still worth a look so I’ve prepared a comparison page showing all the new and planned UMPCs. 14 UMPCs in total. Hope you find it useful.

Click to see the interactive comparison page

Don’t forget to click ‘Show hidden criteria’ to reveal all the details. More details and links are available for each device on the respective datasheet. Just click on the images to see the detailed page for each device. The new ‘as-you-type’ filter can be used to refine the list.

Good news for those waiting for XP-based OQO Model 02 orders today. People are starting to report availability and customers are giving feedback on their first impressions. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any news about Vista versions.

One such report comes from ‘Kenrick’ who has even run some benchmark tests. As usual, the VIA C7 doesn’t post good results against the Intel ULV CPUs so there are no big surprises there. Improvements over the original OQO model are clear though.

Boot time is around 1 minute 5 seconds (from start to desktop availability – no login process,) return from standby looks to be a reasonable 6 seconds and there are some interesting comments about the capacitive scrollbars in this video.

Remember that the XP drivers for the C7 don’t allow full unitization of the video and encryption hardware on board but I hope that VIA will unlock this when they finally get a driver package together for Vista. Its long overdue and I suspect its the cause of delays not only for OQO but for the Medion UMPC too. My attempts to get updates on the situation direct from VIA has so far only received a ‘no comment’ type response which is really disappointing.

More OQO Model 02 threads at OQO Talk.

This makes total sense. The original Vista version of Windows Movie Maker that didn’t work with many UMPC hardware profiles (and extracted a huge moan from me) can now be replaced with a new, working version just release by Microsoft.

Movie Maker 2.6 is for Windows Vista users whose computer cannot run the Vista version of Movie Maker.

JKK. Has just highlighted it in his blog. Thanks JKK! My upgrade path has just been cleared and I’m now considering my next UMPC purchase. Should it be the Samsung Q1 Ultra, should I wait for the HTC Shift or should I see what the 4 new UMPCs look like on April 18th?

Update: Ctitanic has confirmed that it works too.

A few weeks ago I wrote about some testing that ‘Captain’ of Handtops had done on the Flipstart UMPC. He had completed a good range of tests on the device and included the Battery Eater life test. The result was pretty good at 2 and 1/4 hours – 30 minutes (30%) more than the Q1 which uses a similar architecture. Impressive.

The only outstanding variable was the battery capacity. Was it the same as the Q1 or was it a big fat lump of Li-ion? It turns out that its just a big fat lump of energy sitting on the bottom. In fact, its a 40W/hr battery which is over 30% more than the Q1.

I think if the Flipstart had been launched 12 months earlier it would have looked much more impressive and stood a much better chance. In today’s market, with 12 months knowledge and market research floating around on the net, it doesn’t. Even worse, its going to age even more quickly over the next 6 months if Intel has anything to do with it. Flipstart might do well to quickly drop the price of this one and look at getting next-Gen screen and CPU tech inside before the winter season starts.

I reported yesterday on the news coming out via HKEPC from those naughty Taiwanese moles. Today, HKEPC have posted the info in English along with a summary chart (which looks like its HKEPC-generated.)

As before, they report that the processor is a 90nm processor (doesn’t tally with what Intel told me) and the GPU is an X3000 (which I understand is a Santa Rosa part not compatible with old processors?) There’s also a little bit of information about futures too. Menlow is the codename for the 2008 platform and Intel expects the UMPC market to hit 10% of the PC market by 2010.

WHAT!

April 1st is over right? Lets read that again:

Intel expectes the share of UMPC in the PC market will continually go up and score around 10% raising or above by 2010.

By my estimations, the UMPC is taking something like 0.35% of the global notebook  PC market with about 700,000 units to be sold in 2007. [These are my guesstimates – see how I reached these figures here.] 10% of the PC market is something like 50 25 Million units.

Graph below updated
 

While I’d love to see a 400% 300% [corrected] year on year increase, I think there’s been an error somewhere along the way. In fact there’s a few things in the report that smell a bit funny. My money is on ‘fake report.’

As reported by Jenn, Rob and many others, Intel have finally introduced Ultra Low Voltage versions of the Core 2 Duo processors. As I’ve been writing about ULV processors a lot, its worth a little time to asses this news and work out where it fits in in relation to the other Intel developments that are going on.

The two new processors are the U7500 and U7600 (1.06 and 1.2Ghz) and they come in at the top end of the ULV processor range from Intel replacing the Core Duo (U2500 as in the brand new Flybook V5 and LG C1) and forming part of the new Santa Rosa notebook platform.

The two processors can utilise FSB bus speeds of up to 800Mhz and include new enhanced deep sleep (EDS), bus switching and other power-saving feature such as Display Power Saving Technology (DPST) 3.0

Its worth noting that these processors are really part of a notebook range from Intel because with processor TDP ratings of 10W, they will require large format batteries (50w/hr or more.) If battery technology had advanced in the last few years [Dennis has a very valid battery rant over at GottaBeMobile] we might have seen 50W/hr batteries on small UMPCs but as it stands today 50W/hr results in a battery pack too large and heavy for most UMPCs. Maybe we’ll see them in high-end 8.9″ devices later in the year but I wouldn’t expect to see then in mid-range UMPC devices.

For the UMPC market, we need to be looking slightly lower in the Intel range at the Core 2 Solo processors (which, unsurprisingly, have half the power rating!) but there is little known about these at the moment. We can expect 1.06 and 1.2Ghz budget (Celeron brand) and full-spec (Core brand) versions. In the Core range, the U2100 and U2200 processors were due for Q1 launch but haven’t appeared yet. There’s also no word about Celeron versions. Of course, the big question is, what processor is used in the UMPC-focused McCaslin platform. Is it a new 65nm, 800Mhz Santa-Rosa based ‘Core 2’ processor meaning it works with the X3000 GPU and contains a lot of power-saving technology (this is what Intel told me at CeBIT) or is it something that fits in with the Napa Refresh platform meaning i945 chipset and slightly older tech. There were a lot of reports of the Q1 Ultra showing an Intel 945 chipset so its all still up in the air.

My vote still goes for an underclocked Core 2 Solo processor with X3000 GPU.

If its not confusing enough already with information on 65nm Steeley processors, rumors of an i945 chipset and new Tolapai SOC news, The Register are reporting another, different rumor.

This time its from Taiwan, via a Chinese website and it says that Steeley the UMPC-focused CPU and Little River, a northbridge containing an X3000 GPU will all be launched at the IDF on April 18th. It doesn’t say whether the three products are linked with the McCaslin UMPC-focused platform although it does say that the chips work together.

Together, the chips are said to draw no more than 9.3W, with an average power consumption of 1.95W.

With only two weeks to go before the IDF, its almost a certainty that more information will be leaked on McCaslin and the four new Intel-based UMPCs so be ready for more confusion soon!

Thanks to Paul for the tip.