The rumored Palm device becomes reality today. Palm have officially confirmed that they will launch a new device today by posting a press invitation for a live web conference.

“Palm to Announce New Mobile Device on May 30“

There are no clues as to what the device might be but most people in the online mobile community believe that it will be a device that sits between the smartphone and notebook PC market. A mobile computing device. Possibly a low-end or targeted UMPC.

Palm usually take a very targeted approach to their products. Where Windows is a catch-all solution, Palm have tended to focus in to a target group of users so it will be very interesting to see what market they will aim for (I’m guessing the media exec market that hasn’t been hit by Apple yet.) and what device that they come up with.

The palm Webcast is planned for 11:30am Pacific Time. Later in the day Steve and Bill will be on the stage. Its going to be a busy day today for a lot of bloggers!

Via GigaOM.

Like many others across the world, I’ve been relaxing over the last three days. I took the family (of UMPCs, along with my wife and kid!) to Holland where we had a lovely relaxing time by the sea. I managed to stay offline for most of the time but its quite difficult when there’s free WiFi access around you! I couldn’t help but at least keep up with my RSS feeds and there’s two topics that I want to briefly report on before I get fully back into the swing of things tomorrow morning. The first has nothing to do with news at the weekend – Microsoft Autoroute, and the second does – Microsoft Sideshow.

Autoroute is fantastic…for co-drivers.

Autoroute (Europe) / Streets & Trips (America) has got to be one of the best value programs around. I don’t ever remember buying a program with as much current, useful information and interactivity in it for such a cheap price. The details on the moving map are great. The points of interest are endless and the fact that it can plan a route between 2 houses in two different places in Europe will never cease to amaze me. On the way to Holland my wife took the wheel which gave me a good chance to play with it and get to know it. Setting it up with a Bluetooth GPS was simple and entering start and end points was a doddle. Turning in the turn-by-turn directions was easy and the full screen option was a pleasure to watch. And all this in the comfort of my two hands. Which is actually the main point I wanted to make. It ant no drivers-aid so don’t ever think that Autoroute is going to be your co-pilot. You definitely need some concentration and a pair of hands to operate it. I’d love to see it integrated into Origami experience for the 2008 version. If they re-designed the OE interface for single finger usage (and ported it to Windows XP) I think I’d be happy to pay $50-$80 dollars for what could make a nice basic in-car setup. In its current version though its just a tool for a passenger or during a service-station stop.

Sideshow. I don’t see an attraction.

Over the weekend there was a video of a sideshow-enabled Samsung Q1 doing the rounds. Jkkmobile then followed-up with positive thoughts about the possibilities. I had to time to think about it and do some research (I confess – I’m no sideshow expert so I had to do some reading) and I’ve currently got a rather negative feeling about it along with a list of thoughts. The way I see it is that Sideshow is there to enable the presentation of simple data either pulled from the sideshow cache or the local storage on a paired device or through a wake-up process that activates, hopefully, only the components required to pull in data from other sources. Its an always-on simple and remote data-display.

What advantage is a sideshow device going to give you over an Ultra Mobile PCs or Mobile Internet Device? Well, instant, always-on viewing of your calendar and recent emails is one thing. Audio playback is another. Document display could be nice along with, maybe a simple image sideshow applications. Cached RSS feeds would be nice. There’s also the advantage that you can do all that with a very long battery life and at a low cost. By adding this feature to a UMPC hardware you can even utilize some components of the UMPC. You end up with a big sideshow device with a long battery life and huge storage. But how much of an advantage it that? You get to access SOME of your static data and preserve battery life. The problem I have with it is that most of those advantages are already something I have with me all the time, on my cellphone…without me having to buy a Vista-based UMPC or home PC! And in a few years, the timescale it would take sideshow to get mainstream, a low-end UMPC or even an x86-based smartphone will have 8 hours battery life instant-on capabilities anyway. It might even have a detachable, persistent, daylight-readable Bluetooth connected screen. Isn’t a PC in my pocket more useful than a bolt-on sub-set of the PocketPC?

Where’s the compelling reason to buy a sideshow enabled device? Where the unique feature that solves a problem or improves efficiency? Its a nice bit of tech for sure but that’s not something that’s going to appeal to everyone or add value to every personal computing device and certainly not the UMPC. Think about these issues:

• Accessing local data requires screen, hard drive and bus in most cases. As the power-envelope of CPUs and chipsets tends towards negligible, the only UMPC power drain you are left with is the screen, the storage and the radios. If you implemented a slideshow device today, you might see a tangible advantage but in 18 months time, I can’t see there being a massive power-drain advantage in viewing my email through a reduced-size sideshow device over a fully working UMPC.
• Retrieving information from remote home or Internet servers is going to require the use of a radio. Again, minimal advantage over using a UMPC.
• The low-end sideshow devices don’t look like they’ll be able to play any high-end media. I doubt they’ll be able to provide a decent video experience on a 800×480 screen that’s for sure. No Powerpoint presentations, no flash, no plugins.
• Where’s the value of cached RSS feeds when many always-on, always-with-you feature-phones give you a the capability to read cached or even live feeds.
• Where’s the browser? What happens when I click on a URL in an email – do I get a sideshow browser? No. You have to bring your UMPC out of standby anyway. Whats the switch-over time from sideshow to UMPC?
• Will the gadgets actually be able to use an 800×480 or 1024×600 screen or will someone have to write a new set of gadgets that make use of the full UMPC screen?
• How are ‘push’ services handled? Always-on radio?
• The N800 Internet tablet will play music for nearly 10 hours. The Q1b with extended battery will also play music for 10 hours but are people buying UMPCs to play music? Will a sideshow device drive sales of UMPCs as music players? No!
• How much will touch-enabled sideshow hardware add to the cost of my mass-market UMPC or MID? (I saw one report that it could add $100 – that will be too much for a mass-market device.
• If I want an efficient operating system, why should I have to bolt on extra hardware to a desktop system just to make it useable in low-processing power situations? The hardware and operating system need to be tailored for UMPCs. Using sideshow to solve a battery life problem is a botch.
• Why should you have to pay for a Vista license and sideshow hardware just to have an always-on, slim and efficient interface?
• Why should the user be forced to learn a second interface?
• Requires windows vista on UMPC or home PC (heavyweight, unoptimised, expensive.)

What I do see is that for those that are using the Microsoft environment in every part of their mobile technology (home server, windows smartphone, windows UMPC) it could be nice to have a sideshow device on your mobile phone that can use the UMPC, smartphone or home server when required. In fact, with some development it could a smart-screen device that kills the MID segment! Its going to nice for the fashion market and there could be some possibilities for very low-end branded devices (a flickr camera perhaps?) but with all due respect to jkk, I think he got it wrong this time. What we really need is focus on UMPC development. Lets bring them to the point where they become the full capability, x86-based, instant-on companion device. I don’t want a sideshow, I want the main attraction!

Technorati tags: sideshow, umpc

There’s a flurry of activity over at Origamiproject.com as US-based forum members swap hints and tips about buying the Q1 Ultra and using coupons to get further discounts. Buy.com appear to be taking orders for the Q1 Ultra EL for $779.99 with free delivery and someone has managed to redeem a coupon against it and get it for $723 with a further discount on an extended battery for a total of $809 shipped. That’s a fantastic price. This is the 600Mhz Q1 Ultra (I wonder how long it will take someone to work out a ‘fix’ for getting the 600Mhz part to run at 800Mhz) so its going to be interesting to see how Vista fairs.

So does this mean that the Q1b is no longer the best budget UMPC? Last month it was a sub $800 UMPC but the cheapest I can find today is $850 (CDW.com.) Do the people responsible for pricing think that the Q1b is better than the Q1U-EL? Does this say something about the Q1U-EL or will we see the price of the Q1b drop below $700 as soon as the Q1 Ultra EL is available?

Details on the various Q1 Ultra models are in our database. Here’s a comparison page showing all four models.

The Kohjinsha has, apparently, passed all CE and FCC tests now and is on its way to Europe in F00KS (awesome model id!) form. That’s the 40GB touchscreen version. At last there’s a use for the swivel screen!

The SA1 is a great machine. Excellent screen (I have only seen the non-touchscreen version. I’ll try and find out if this version is any less bright) with fantastic 4-hour battery life and fast SD and CF slots. Bluetooth and WiFi are also included. The only things I didn’t like about it were the keyboard (its OK but could be better) and the plastics (a bit cheap.)

PocketPC Solutions, the guys that have the Vega and T770 will supply the Kohjinsha SA1 with Windows Home across Europe for just under 600 pounds plus delivery, putting it in the low pricing category with the T770, R2H and Q1. I’ve also just noticed that they have the excellent MyPower MP3400 power bank (aka. Tekkeon, TabletKiosk.) which I have tested with the Kohjinsha SA1. I got 9 hours of video playback out of it!

The Kohjinsha SA1F00KS in now in the UMPCPortal database.

(Via MyKohjinsha.)

The company with the UMPC-tablet-unfriendly name, The Beijing Peace East something-or-other Company, who I am now going to refer to as the brand, Porient, have sent me an update on the H9 that I reported on at CeBIT (video below) The very important update is that it has gone into pilot production and that they’re not going to do a Raon Digital on us after all. They will put the BT and WiFi radios inside it in the ‘next-step.’  I assume that means that it will be produced with BT and WiFi on board.

It would make quite an interesting device would it not be for that RISC-based architecture. Hardware wise it looks OK and with a bulk trade price of around $500 it could have been an attractive Pepper Pad challenger. It might have even been able to run MIDinux. Its a MID before its time! I’d like to have a another play with it though. If the Linux is well built with a nice browser engine, it might not make a bad web-pad or car PC.

Here’s the video from CeBIT again. New images are in the Porient H9 gallery. Specs and links are available in the product portal, here.

Linda and myself must have a thought-line between us. She published Q1b vs Q1P battery life test results on the same day as me!

Battery Life:  an amazing 4 hours and 16 minutes  in always on mode, wireless on, no standby, no hibernate and the screen and hard drive on.   Which is close to double the battery life of the Q1. 

Keep in mind that you should get another 1 or more hours of of battery life if you were to use “Max Battery Life” mode from the pre set in the Samsung battery manager. 

Linda didn’t say what she was actually doing on the Q1b at the time but I suspect it was a fairly quiescent state. Probably with the screen turned down below 50%. Certainly a DivX video will play for four hours and I dare say you could type for four hours but browsing is getting to be quite a processor intensive activity these days so you won’t get that life if you’re using it as a web tablet. As an audio player with an extended battery you could even stretch to 10 hours (good for a party perhaps!) but again, its not a common usage scenario. When you get into common usage, the gap between Intel and VIA closes up a little. Having said that, my Q1b with built-in HSDPA is turning out to be a real gem of a device. I will try and install the HID drivers on it today (which work very nicely on the Q1P – thanks Ctitanic.) The only issue is an incompatibility between the Q1B right-hand USB port and the keyboard from the organiser pack. It doesn’t recognise the keyboard unless you put a passive USB hub inline.

At under $799 from one or two retailers in the US, the Q1b represents damn good value and when bought with the organiser pack, would be my recommendation for anyone looking for a sub-$1000 UMPC or portable PC/keyboard combo. It also make a killer long-haul entertainment platform. The picture on the right shows the Q1b with the extended battery, original battery pack and a 56w/hr battery pack. The total weight of 1.5KG, less than most ‘lightweight’ notebooks, gives you  20 hours of quality video playback! The Q1P+ Organiser pack in desktop-mode is shown in the background.

Lindas comparison is here at TabletPC2.  Q1b specs and links here.

Why do patents always have to look like they were scribbled down during a monthly team meeting? If recent history is anything to go by though, creating patents is a normal part of a hi-tech business so can someone by these guys a decent CAD machine please? In the last two days I’ve seen both Samsung and Nokia patents being aired on the Internet.  The Samsung patent shows two devices. One of which looks like our UMPC-X (and the HTC Shift!) the other looks like some sort of games pad.

 
Samsung Vs UMPCPortal! More info on the Samsung patents at Unwiredview.

Then today, we saw the Nokia patent at Gizmodo (source: Patent Monkey) which according to the patent details, was filed in 2002!  My vote goes to UMPC-X. Which reminds me. I spoke to the designer again and apparently they are working on a slightly modified version of UMPC-X now. I’ll see if I can tease them into sending me a picture without mentioning the letters H, T or C.

Its well-known by now that the Samsung Q1b out-performs other versions of the Q1 in battery life tests. jkOnTheRun did a Battery Eater test not long back which proved without any question that the VIA-based device wins on battery life. They also gave some figures from Notebook Hardware Control which I thought I’d expand on today in a bit more detail.

I have the two devices in front of me now (both 1GB RAM, 60GB drive) and have run them both through 6 tests designed to highlight some differences. There are a few synthetic tests, some real-world tests and a screen test. Here are power drain results:

It’s quite clear that the VIA based device wins over the Intel one and the result I find most interesting is that from Test1. After removing as many variables as possible, the Intel platform takes a massive 65% more power. It gives us some idea of how much power the Intel chipset and GPU requires just to tick over. If we add the screen and start surfing, the difference narrows considerably. Under normal conditions, the Intel device is taking around 20% more power. You need to be careful with the Intel device too because if you let it rip it will drain a huge 18W of battery power!

Test1 – WiFi off, backlight off, CPU in sleep state, BT off, HDD inactive.
Test2 – Video watching (2mbps divx, GOMPlayer), Night brightness (2 bars), max battery settings.
Test3 – Audio playback (GOMPlayer):Screen backlight off. All radios off. Max battery settings.
Test4 – Web Browsing. 50% brightness, WiFi on. Result taken over 10-20 logged measurements (seconds)
Test5 – Max power settings, WiFi on, max screen, Bluetooth on, HSDPA on (Q1b only)  100% WMV HD video playback: 100%load
Test6 – Screen variance between min and max settings. Taken at various times. Averaged.

I didn’t just run these tests to prove a VIA vs Intel point. The idea is that I have some benchmarks to refer to when we start to get results from UMPCs running on the UMP 2007 (McCaslin) platform. I expect to see test1 results drop down by at least 1W, maybe 2W. The screen results on the Q1 Ultra should be much better than 2.5W too. I’m hoping for 1-1.5W reduction in those numbers. 

For further analysis on the McCaslin platform battery life improvements, take a look at this report where I estimated that the average drain rate would be around 20-25% less than the current platform. If I’m right, it would bring it right in line with VIA’s platform thus taking away one of their advantages. The VIA Technical Forum is under 2 weeks away and VIA have already highlighted this as an Ultra Mobility event. It will be interesting to see what their counter attack is.