Don’t get too excited as there’s really no meat here. Frank talks about a DELL UMPC rumor. Apparently it won’t have a keyboard. I also read a blog a few weeks ago that was talking about and HP UMPC and if we’re on a rumor roll here then don’t forget that BenQ are also said to be producing a UMPC this year. Oh, and there’s Averatec (‘maybe Christmas time’ they told me last week.) And Acer and Toshiba too!

I feel sure than nearly ALL PC manufacturers are looking at UMPCs by now. They would be silly not to look at the possibilities with Menlow and Mobile-ITX for 2008. The image on the left shows a prototype from Intel that I haven’t seen anyone using yet. I wonder….!

Good news for UMPC vendors trading in Europe today. The Financial Times reports that the iPhone will launch in the UK, France and Germany with 2.5G only during 2007. (shortened story here.)

So, the ‘real Internet’ (says Kevin Tofel) on a mobile phone won’t actually be mobile until at least 2008 and I suspect that it will be at least late 2008 before Europe gets a 2nd gen, 3G iPhone. This also means that if you’re choosing a mobile phone to partner with a notebook or UMPC as a modem, you can forget the iPhone. My recommendation would be this 3-step plan to the 3-device strategy.

• Don’t go ‘high-end bulky business smartphone’ go thin, light and stylish. Take the chance to buy an object of desire. A nice 3.5G capable Samsung U700 or LG Shine that will slip into your pocket and give you email, RSS, mini-web, camera, storage and a 3G cellular modem.
• Throw your notebook in the bin/eBay.
• Buy a 5-7″ ultra mobile PC that will give the the real, true, honest, full Internet experience, a mobile video experience like none you’ve had before, a mobile workstation for real on-the-go productivity, an in-car navigation and entertainment solution and more storage and connectivity that any normal user could expect to use.
• Use your desktop PC for your hi-end and long duration productivity work. If you must have a notebook, get one that replaces your desktop PC.

If Apple turn up with an 800×480 device capable of the FIE and HQ video playback then sure, lets take another look but remember, if you want the FIE its not going to go into your pocket for a few years yet. You’re going to need to consider that three-device strategy until those folding scrolling screens are sorted out and Bill Gates recons that’s going to be another 5 years at least.

iPhone news via Mobile2Day.de

The N800 runs Skype at last!

Thoughtfix pinged me this morning (while I was browsing from bed!) to let me know that a software upgrade was available for the N800. My only answer was ‘Skype?’ Sure enough, its there, its a tailored N800 application and it works. This is really great news. He was making a video while I dragged myself out of bed and across the hallway into the office. I saw his Skype presence active and gave him a call. You’ll see it in the video that Thoughtfix has put up. Calling from N800 over 3G (Vodafone Germany) to EVDO (not sure what networks Thoughtfix is on) and Thoughtfix’s N800 worked too although it was a little choppy.

A second bonus is that YouTube is much improved. If you let the video download before playing it, it works smoothly. I suspect that the quality has been cut as the quality you see if similar to the quality under Windows when you set the Flash player to ‘low quality.’

Update: Rhapsody works In Europe! Well at least the 30-day free trial works OK.

Check out Thoughtfix’s Video at TabletBlog.com.

More Nokia N800 info.

Fancy a 7 hour UMPC? Well the Toshiba Portege is said to have a 7 hours battery life in 800gms of weight. Why can’t UMPCs use the same technology? Wouldn’t it be great to have an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.2Ghz GMA950 UMPC using the new U7600 Intel 65nm processor? Wooosh! Well, let me bring you some news. Intel based UMPCs use exactly the same technology and are often MORE efficient than the Toshiba Portege R500. 7 hours into a UMPC just doesn’t fit.

As usual with manufacturers battery life claims, its mostly smoke and mirrors. Firstly, Toshiba have used a nice testing trick that we’ve seen before. The 7 hours life is based on the JEITA test. To be blunt, its rubbish! I analyzed that test a few months back when I was suspicious of Fujistsu’s 4 hours UMPC battery life claim and found that its one of the easiest battery tests you could ever give a PC. Its a hands-off low-load and idle test and is effectively useless in determining real-world figures. Real-world usage with WiFi, reasonable screen brightness, and rich browsing is surprisingly heavyweight and easily knocks off about 30% of battery life from the JEITA test so in this 7-hour case, you’re already down to under 5 hours. Secondly, we’re dealing with an Intel processor and GPU here. Devices based on these chips can idle nicely down to very low power drain levels but can also burst to very high drain levels. A 1.2Ghz Intel CPU and GPU running at full tilt runs at least twice the drain of say, the AMD Geode LX800. Its not surprising that some R500 testers are reporting around 4 hours battery life because Vista and media-rich websites will use all the processing power they can get to perform their tasks and when the task is done, the user will just keep piling on new tasks! The final important point to note is that there a huge battery on the R500. In fact its about double the size of a standard UMPC battery at around 60W/hr. The same marketing trick is used with the Flipstart UMPC. It ships with a relatively massive 40W/hr battery and appears to have a good battery life. When you analyze the figures you can see why! Oh, there’s one other thing too. The 800gms weight is for an SSD version of the R500. I’m guessing that the JEITA tests where done using the SSD version which would have saved even more power.

If you factor all these elements in and scale the whole Portege R500 product down to UMPC sizes, weights and heat dispersion characteristics, you end up with a 30W/hr battery and around 2 hours of useable battery life which is exactly what we had 1 year ago. The only way you could scale the Portege down into a competitive UMPC-sized package would be to limit the ‘burst’ capability of the silicon and simply put, to slow the user down. I wonder how you could do that? Cap the clockrate perhaps? Well well well! That’s exactly where we are today with the Intel-based Stealey UMPCs.  Menlow, due at the end of 2007, will be interesting. There’s some new and quite mind-boggling chemistry and physics going into the 45nm ‘low-k dielectric’ that should help to bring the watt-per-clock and thermal characteristics down a lot but don’t expect miracles. Bandwidth capping will remain an important battery, heat-saving and user-slowing technique.

So does the R500 look any good after that? Well, I guess so. Its using ultra-efficient components and that’s always good in my book. Its got a nice transreflective, LED back-lit display and if you need a full sized keyboard and DVD burner, its there! Apart from that though, I can’t really tell you much about these notebook things. I’ve never owned one and probably never will.

Choosing a UMPC just got a little bit more difficult! The Fujitsu Lifebook U1010 is going on sale in Australia for $AU1900. That directly translates to a fairly high dollar figure but if you take into account the usual territorial pricing differences you can recon on around $1100. We’re in a position now where the Everun, the Q1 Ultra, the Kohjinsha and the Lifebook UMPC’s are all battling for our love. Check out this live comparison list.

There’s also a review available from CNet Asia. I’d like to highlight one section of the review:

Sad to say, one of the pitfalls of the first-generation UMPCs was their weak battery life, a factor which still plagues this Lifebook. With around 3 hours of runtime between charges on its standard two-cell battery

Yes, the battery life hasn’t increased since early devices, what HAS happened is that the battery size has reduced. The Fuji uses a 19W/hr battery. That’s just two-thirds the size of the Q1 Ultra battery. The rest of the review is brief but sound. Don’t miss the video.

 
Click for forum and more news.

Finally, there’s an official Fujitsu website up in English now. See Fujitsu Singapore.

Click for a live image.

The number of Internet posts referring to UMPCs is increasing incredibly quickly. Looking at this Technorati graph [live], I estimate that its at least doubled in the last 6 months. Is it because ‘UMPC’ is becoming a marketing buzzword? Are all those posts negative? I’m certainly feeling the effect on the portal. (We hit 0.5 million pages/month in June – ten times the figure compared to June 2005) and my RSS feed searches are also turning up similar effects. People are really starting to explore the UMPC theme. Try adding this Google blogsearch UMPC RSS feed to your reader. Its quite amazing to see the amount of people around the world blogging about UMPCs. Alternatively, just stay tuned here for the ‘best of’ UMPC news – both from external and internal sources.

Steve / Chippy

Like the I-Mate Ultimate and the Sharp Em-One, here’s a device form factor that I like to see. Unfortunately, like the aforementioned devices, it runs Windows Mobile on an ARM processor and that puts it in the Sub-UMPC/Uber-Smartphone category for me. No FIE, no UMPC tag! The HTC Omni (previous report here) is rumored to be launched in October. That’s about the same time as the Shift.

Unwiredview have the scoop and specs and they include an 800×480 screen, UMTS/HSDPA, TV+VGA out, GPS and 1.2GB of RAM. Its the Advantage done properly! I’ll put this one in the database and hope that it gets an upgrade to a Menlow or Mobile-ITX platform in 2008!

Following a news item from Engadget, I see that the Pocket Surfer 2 from Datawind is nearly ready to launch. The Pocket Surfer is a 174gm web pad with a built in GPRS data radio. I wrote something about this a while back when it was billed as the ‘ worlds fastest handheld device‘ and since then we now know that its got a 640 wide screen, costs around 180 pounds including data costs for a year and works by connecting through a proxy server. Battery life is quoted as 2 hours.

If it displays web sites properly, it could be worth it for online poker addicts and the like but I’ll reserve judgement until I know how it handles complex web sites and privacy.

Via Engadget.