Roger Butterworth is the CEO of Expansys, a company that turned over 54 million pounds doing business with smartphones and handheld devices last year. It looks to me like they are taking serious note of the UMPC sector. This is taken from their annual report:

We look forward with considerable anticipation to the release of the Nokia N90, the HTC Shift and the Apple i-Phone (in the UK) which should all generate considerable consumer interest. [my emphasis.]

And now the CEO is hooked on UMPCs. Check out the latest entry on the Expansys insider blog.  Roger Butterworth appears to get umpcs.

I’ve been using an OQO model e2 for a month now as my main PC, it has performed brilliantly over that time and I just gave my old laptop away, I’m hooked…

I’ll keep an eye out for him at the HTC product launch on Monday and if I see him i’ll see if I can get an interview.

Via an article at JKOnTheRun, I’ve been reading, and re-reading the article written by Michael Mace over at Rubicon Consulting. It brings up a good point. If people rarely use a feature, it doesn’t mean that its easy to drop it from a products feature list. People will still want that feature for as long as they like to imagine themselves using it in the future.

Its a classic failure on the consumers part. We all do it because its almost impossible to reign-in those exciting ideas and future scenarios of how you might use a feature. One case in point – webcams. I like the idea of having a webcam on my SH6 but I’ve never actually used it.

Would that theory be the same  with a highly targeted and disguised PC? Like a MID for example? Its a PC. Its a SubPC. It will run Windows if you want it to, but will people imagine themselves doing windows-type things on it? If they are marketed correctly and listed under ‘portable media players’ rather than ‘ultra mobile PCs’ I don’t think the customer will expect to be able to edit videos and store 100GB of data on it. My argument is that if you cloak a device correctly, you can get away with a reduced feature set. Of course, the target audience changes and the price-bracket too. A MID won’t sell for $700 if its in the portable media player section. But will it sell for $700 in the notebook section?

Good article though. Worth reading.

Frank of UltraMobilePC-Tips has posted an excellent example of the space and energy saving advantages of a UMPC. Here’s a work position before the transformation. Click through the image to Franks blog to see the ‘after’ shot.

UltraMobilePC-Tips

I’ve talked about the ‘Carrypad concept device’ before. It’s my ideal UMPC device specification that started the ball rolling with the Journal in Feb 2006, before the MS UMPC was launched. The details got a bit lost in the journal archives underneath all the other UMPC news so here’s a re-post and summary of the Carrypad concept device.

Following the US OQO price drop, Flipstart are also announcing a price cut.

I guess they’ve swept up those early adopters now and are moving into the next phase of their marketing plan. $1500 buys you the Pentium-M based device which is quite reasonable if you’re looking for a relatively powerful, cellular-data enabled ultra mobile solution.

More details from Flipstart here.

Flipstart review links and specifications here.

I will laugh my *** off if Apple release an ARM-based embedded Internet device after I’ve just spent 3 days preparing a report that say’s ‘don’t go ARM.’ 

Apple would be rather silly not to be looking at a mobile Internet device though considering they’ve invested so much into porting and optimizing a real browser to an ARM-based architecture and I always believed they would utilize the iPhone investment in order to create multiple products. I wonder if it will include the 9-second penalty though. Will it be the first FIE-capable ARM-based device?

Original story: Appleinsider.

Lets talk about mobile Internet devices of today. Mobile, consumer devices that offer Internet and media capabilities on-the-go and that are consumer-priced and marketed. I’m talking about iPhones, Nokia tablets, Smartphones, PMPs and the like. In general, these devices are based on an ARM architecture and for good reasons too because the ARM architecture has a lot of advantages. ARM-based devices have the advantage of always, or, instant-on and for certain tasks you can not deny that instant-on is faster. There’s a clear advantage in battery life and even the Internet browsing compatibility issues are being cleared up. The browser on the N800 is a great example of how the experience is advancing towards desktop standards. But its not nearly there yet, and its slow! Very slow and that’s a serious problem because however good the browser engine is, however cool the device looks or feels, if the cant give you your results in a reasonable amount of time, its not worth it. The customer will turn off.

The mobile Internet experience needs to be compatible and quick and if either one of those elements fails, then the customers Internet experience fails.

Read on…

As you might have read on The::Unwired and other websites, HTC are holding press conferences in London and Munich next week. They will be launching their Q4 range of devices. I’ve managed to confirm that the HTC Shift will be there.

UMPCPortal will be there too. This is an important chance to get questions answered and get some hands-on. To find out when and how much, to find out about final specifications and to get a view on that battery level! The London press conference starts at 11:30 UK time (GMT+1) on Monday.I will have a chance to sit down with John Wang, Chief Marketing Officer of HTC for 10 minutes so if you have ideas for questions, please add them into the comments section below and I’ll pick out a set to take with me.

Of course, I’ll need to prepare a suitable reporting kit too. The SH6 should do nicely both as a productive tool and a size comparison! Due to the short battery life though, I’ll probably take the Everun too. That will look nice against some of the new smartphones!