I made it down to Karlsruhe in Germany after a quite stressful train journey with the bike and all the kit and after a short journey that turned out to be a 2.5hours trek to the campsite. I just managed to get the tent up before it got dark and I had to dive straight into the tent though because there are thousands of hungry mosquitos here. After spending an hour trying to organise my kit inside my one-man tent (I gave up) I finally settled down with the local […]

Planning a busman’s holiday around the weather isn’t that easy. Camp set-up and break down, cycling between locations, working, keeping an eye on the weather, finding suitable places to work and charging power sources all need to be thought about. The key to success here (in our wonderfully changeable weather system) is to be flexible between 10:00 and 16:00 when there’s a possibility to get something out of the sun. Outside these hours there isn’t enough power in the sunlight to make it worth any effort or planning. The original plan was […]

And that is about as good as its going to get I think. Time is running out fast and a good weather window is approaching. ‘Only’ 20-30% chance of rain. 6 hours of sun per day. 28th, 29th and 30th don’t look too fantastic but I’m afraid I’m going to have to take the risk. The Solar UMPC Tour is under starters orders!

In April 2006, shortly after the launch of ‘Origami’, In-Stat produced a report that surprised a lot of people. “8 million units by 2011” it said. Then we had an estimate of 22 million by 2010 from both VIA and Intel and from Chippy, who’s not the most recognised statistician in the world, we had “700,000 units in 2007.”

Graph based on “10% by 2010”

In the latest report from In-Stat written by Ian Lao, they are sticking with the prediction of 8 million units in 2011 which is much much less than VIA or Intel predicted. They are using the term ‘UMD’ now though and that will please VIA because that’s the term they use ion their marketing. 

Unfortunately we can’t get hold of the report details because the report isn’t free but Windows For Devices managed to extract a snippet from the report: “2008-2010 will be key years for the development of anytime/anywhere wireless connectivity, which is considered necessary for widespread adoption of the UMD paradigm.” and noted that In-Stat didn’t define the form factor of a UMD. Its not surprising as its a designers dream market out there right now. “one ultra mobile device will not be able to meet all of the different usages and applications.” say In-Stat. Absolutley true! Its all about personalised mobile computing in the UMPC space.

In-Stat’s definition of a UMD.

They are careful not to say ‘x86 only’ there aren’t they! Looking at the contents page I’d certainly like to read the ‘Market Drivers’ section and ‘Technologies and Market Inflection points’ section and I’m sure a lot of other people would too! At this point though, I feel its the right time to plug my own reports and information!

Here’s my base definition of a UMPC from 2006 along with some good discussion about form factor here. My definition of the Full Internet Experience (FIE) is here and you can find good info in the buyers guide including ‘What is a UMPC’, ‘Mobile Device categories’ and ‘Types of UMPCs’ . The site overview is here along with a list of RSS feeds here. That should keep you going for a while but If you need more specific info or analysis then drop me a line and we can talk about a tailored report.

Via Windows For Devices.

There was an announcement by Adobe today and its one that I feel is rather important for web focused devices. The Flash 9 player will support H.264 encoding (MPEG-4 Part 10). Those words may not mean much to some people but what is happening could have a big impact on the way we view online video on our mobile devices. Basically, the most common browser plugin in use today, Flash, is going to support an new video format and there’s a chance that this embeded video player could be made a lot more CPU efficient. Ryan Stewart, an Abode employee and blogger says:

Flash Player will also support MPEG-4 standard container files that contain video and audio data encoded using H.264/HE-AAC, including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, 3g2.  So basically you can play full, hardware accelerated 1080p Quicktime videos inside of the updated Flash Player. Welcome to the next generation of web video. [my emphasis]

UMPC-owners should ignore the ‘HD’ part of that statement because H.264 requires a lot of CPU for HD content but this new support could mean a more efficient low-bandwidth solution. Currently the Flash plugin uses the FLV container format with H.263 or VC6 encoded content but the efficiency of the plugin leaves a lot to be desired. You can see this easily in devices like the Q1b, Kohjinsha SA1 and Everun where YouTube playback, although low-bandwidth, is very choppy.  If Adobe has taken the opportunity to implemented H.264 decoding efficiently in the embedded player then things are looking up for embedded and streamed video on UMPCs. The press release does mention ‘hardware accelerated’ playback too but we’ll have to see exactly what that means when Moviestar is made available in public beta format later today on the Adobe Labs website I’ll be testing it out as soon as I can to see what sort of CPU-load it requires and how it performs on the Q1B/P and Everun. I’m hoping we can say goodbye to choppy, low quality YouTube videos in the very near future.

I worked late last night and rewarded myself with a huge lie-in this morning. I dreamt that someone was ringing the doorbell…..HOLY COW its the EVERUN! You never saw anyone get out of bed so quickly in all your life! I just about managed to make myself a cup of tea and get some clothes on before I turned the video cam on for a quick unboxing to see what the differences were between the retail and production sample devices. I’m pleased to say that Raon have refined the final build quite nicely, apart from the XP installation on the device I got. It wouldn’t activate and all I had was a Korean language install disc! It turns out that Raon sent me the wrong software build and that’s being sorted out now so I should be ready to do the SSD tests later tomorrow. I made a video of the unboxing which isn’t the most exciting video I’ve ever done but if you’re considering the Everun its worth watching.

More info about the Everun including specs, images and review links can be found in the product portal.

Click ‘Read more’ if you’re not already reading the full article…

If you want to see a demo of Vista running on the Kohjinsha SH6 with Aero Glass and in full sunlight, take a look at this great video by JKK.

At this point I would say something like ‘for more commentary, pop over to JKK’s site’ but jkk is not a big fan of typing so there’s not much else to see apart from a link back here! See if you can tease something out of him in the comments!

Asustek company chairman Jonney Shih predicted that they will ship 3-5m (million) Eee PCs in 2008. Wow! If they think that there’s that much demand for mini PC’s then why aren’t we seeing other manufacturers taking the plunge with small PCs. So far we’ve seen the SA1, the SH6 and soon, the Packard Bell Easynote XS and Everex mini notebook devices (based on the Nanobook reference design.) but only the Nanobook variants are targeting the lower-price market. (VIA’s Bjorn Stromberg has posted a comparison report on the Eee PC and Nanobook today.)

The Eee PC isn’t that cheap either. The mainstream version is planned to be available (to resellers or consumers?) for US$349 which, when you consider that there’s no hard drive, no Bluetooth, no touchscreen and no Windows operating system, isn’t as exciting as the $200 device mentioned back in June.

Digitimes say that volume shipments of the Eee PC will start in Mid Sept which means customers could be getting hands-on in October if the first batch of 20,000 isn’t already taken by special orders.

Eee PC Specifications and links.

VIA Digitimes.