Akihabaranews have posted their 3-day review of the Fujitsu FMV-U8240 UMPC. They had a Windows XP version to test and overall they were pretty impressed. How can you fail to be impressed with such an amazing example of modern technology. The Fujitsu is a full PC! Not a cut-down operating system and low-end processor architecture, a real PC! (with twice the CPU clockrate as my mothers desktop PC!)

There are a couple of things that I would like to comment on. Firstly WMV HD playback. Akihabara says it was ‘impossible to play’ but I know for sure that the Q1 Ultra can handle WMV 720HD at around 6mbps bitrate. The Fujitsu will be able to handle that too as its basically the same engine underneath the hood. I guess they were throwing something pretty heavy at it. 1024HD perhaps? Or maybe the battery saving profile was set to force low-performance/long battery life.

Functionality over form is an important thing to highlight. While the Sony UX is all bells and whistles with an, admittedly, stylish design, the Fujitsu appears to be the functionality winner. I’m guessing the keyboard in approaching twice the speed of the Sony UX and that’s going to make a huge difference to usability.

Battery is 2:30 to 3:30 and not the 4 hours listed on the spec sheet. This is something I predicted and wrote about in detail here (showing the ‘trick’ that manufacturers use to make the battery life figure look better than it is under real use scenarios.)

Akihabaranews review is here. Fujitsu UMPC specification page here.

There are still some outstanding questions though and I’m talking to Akihabara to try and get these answered.

• Soft Touch or Hard Touch screen?
• Battery capacity – V and Mah
• Keyboard  quality (how many characters per minute  compared to your normal typing speed.)
• Heat?
• Return from standby speed?
• Screen brightness? (outdoor? Comparison to another device?)
• How does it compare in usability to the Kohjinsha SA1? (Keyboard, speed, battery life)
• Is it really pocketable?
• How does the local price compare to, say, the top-end Q1 Ultra SSD?
• What do you think the target market of the device is?

Looking at some of the import prices (Dynamism and Geekstuff4u) you’re looking at a starting price of around $1700 which I estimate to be IRO $1400 as a locally distributed price. That positions it, pricing-wise, somewhere around the OQO, Sony UX and Q1 Ultra HSDPA mark. In terms of sizing and weight though, think more along the lines of the Raon Digital products, the Sony UX, OQO, Medion and Gigabyte products. (Here’s a comparison page showing those products with their sizes, weights and features.)

The buzz about the Q1 Ultra is big! I’ll be honest, I thought I might be able to secure one for last week but it fell through and I’m pretty jealous (in a nice way!) that you guys over in the good ole U S of, have got them already. Fortunately the new owners aren’t keeping all the info to themselves. There’s a huge amount of posting going on over at Origamiportal. Despite the name, its still the best place to be if you want to talk UMPC’s. (and that’s coming from someone that runs a UMPC forum!)

Grandall, a member and new Q1 Ultra owner there, kindly gave me permission to pull out and summarize some of the things he’s been reporting about his Q1 Ultra (Vista) over the last few days. The thread is still going strong (92 replies as I write this!) so tune in here to follow the news.

A quick disclaimer before I start. This is third party info. I’m obviously sanity checking as I go but don’t blame either myself or Grandall if…well you get the idea. Here we go in chrono’ order:

Screen:

The screen seems very good for inking so far.  It’s as good or better than my Fujitsu P1510 and LG C1.  It’s very responsive to light touches.

Overall feel for speed: Not bad.  I’ll play with it more and try out movies this evening.  It feels a bit less responsive than the Fujitsu P1510 (with a 1.1GHz Pentium M), but that’s probably as much Vista as the CPU speed difference.  Regardless, I don’t feel that it’s unreasonably slow relative to my expectations. 

On the battery:

This morning I’ve been testing it on batteries, and after an hour of heavy use with the default Samsung settings it says it’s at 70% battery.  So maybe 3.5-4 hours of fairly heavy use, a bit more just listening to music and reading email.

To add to this, I just used it for slightly more than an hour with what I would count as light use: Outlook was running getting email, some looking at spreadsheets in Excel, and a short amount of web surfing, and it was at 80% battery after that.  So about five hours of light use seems reasonable.

Video performance:

I tried this [Coral Reef WMV 6mbps video – ed.] , and it ran smoothly on battery in Windows Media Center.  The regular Media Player had problems with it, but it didn’t seem related to the processor wasn’t pegged at 100%.  There must have been something else going on there.  Anyway, so yes, it can play that type of HD video.

There’s not much bloat, per se.  It comes with McAfee Security Center running, and a 90-day trial of that.  I will probably uninstall that and replace it with AVG Free, but otherwise I don’t see anything I need to get rid of.  There are a number of other programs related to the functions of the Q1.  It’s also preloaded with Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader, and other generally harmless things.

The 60GB drive is reported by Windows as 55GB.  Of that, 10GB is reserved as a recovery partition.  Vista Home Premium and the other applications take about 10GB at first load.  That left about 35GB free on the C drive.

The CPU is single core.

Gaming?

I loaded Neverwinter Nights (the original, not 2), and it runs in 1024×600 resolution with low detail reasonably OK.  The controls seem to work pretty well, as the stylus works perfectly, with left hand holding the Q1 and thumb on either the mini keyboard or mouse knob, and right holding the stylus and pressing buttons.  While I wouldn’t use the word “fast” to describe it, it works well enough to be amusing

How’s the keyboard?

Mixed feelings on the keyboard.  For short text like quick emails, it’s fine.  For something like entering a strong password, with mixed-case letters, numbers, and symbols, it’s torture since there aren’t dedicated number keys and almost all symbols require pressing another button first.  It’s especially bad for passwords that are hidden on the screen since you can’t be quite sure if you didn’t hit the wrong key or get a symbol to show up.  So I’d say that it’s very nice to have it there compared with not having a keyboard at all, but it’s not something I’d want to use too often.  Someone who is more used to typing on similar keyboards (like Blackberrys) might find it more natural than I do.

Thanks to Grandall for the permission to re-post.

I’ve just updated the Solar-UMPC blog. I’m in the last week of preparations and I thought I’d do a test run with the UMPC, tent and baggage in the garden. All is going very well indeed. The weather is warm, its past midnight, it dead quite and my daughter is snoring in the tent. Forget the bath office, sitting under the stars with a UMPC is where its at!

Goodnight everyone!

I can still hear the echo’s of my wife’s call…..”Come to bed…come to bed….” but I have to post this. Sorry wifey.

Akihabara have posted a review of the Fujitsu UMPC. In French only at the moment but will be in English tomorrow. Google translation does a good job (here) and gives us some nice info.

…less sexy than Vaio UX, the materials are also less beautiful and does everything “class much less” that a UX. On the other hand with regard to ergonomics, the general use and the power of this last, then the CHEER, because under XP our U8240 is all the same very nimble and pleasant to use…

…but even in the current state of the things to be chosen between Vaio UX and U8240… I would take without hesitating Fujitsu!

I think that makes sense but I’m going to wait until tomorrow’s English version before I make any conclusions.

There’s a lovely video too. Yesterday I wanted a Raon Digital Everun but today.. well, take a look. (HQ version. More versions available on Akihabara.)

JKKMobile has sniffed out a good set of Fujitsu FMV-U8240 images over at Akihabara.

I couldn’t find them as a direct link over at Akihabara.com but via a bit of blogsearcing I’ve found them via Laptopspirit.fr The originals are here. Jkk highlights the two mini pci-express slots and an easily accessible HDD bay just crying out for a solid-state transplant!

There’s some really excellent images there. Now all we need is pricing!

Source: Akihabara Via jkkmobile

ViaArena have updated their recent UMPC Gaming series with another video. So far they’ve covered Half-Life, Counterstrike, Starcraft and World of Warcraft. Today they’ve got a video of Quake III Arena running at 640×480 on an OQO Model 02. Its difficult to see detail but its certainly running smoothly and looks like it could be a HUGE timewaster for execs that should know better than to play games when they should be making spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations. If your boss has an OQO Model 02 and turns up to the next meeting with a serious attitude problem, this could be the reason.

All the previous videos are at ViaArena. Here’s the latest one.