I’m no Hugo Ortega, UMPC owner extrordinaire but I do have a nice clutch of UMPC devices at the moment and it sees silly to waste the chance for a gathering. I thought we could do some head to head testing or just gabber about UMPCs for a while on the chat channel. How about later today? I’ll be in the studio from about 9pm CET with some cold beer and a few cameras. Who knows what will happen!

On the boards tonight:

• Samsung q1P (also for sale. Make me an offer. Maybe I will auction it live!)
• Samsung Q1b HSDPA
• Samsung Q1 Ultra
• OQO e2 1.6 Vista
• Vye S37b
• Kohjinsha SH6
• Everun S36S and L30S
• Bitburger Beer

If you want to go live too, send me your embed code and ill try and fit you in on the live page. (I’ve never tried it but i assume you can run multiple streams on one web page)

UMPCPortal Live page. Sat 27th 2100.

This entry written on the sofa using the OQO. Not a bad keyboard at all!

Remember the UMPC bargain of the year? Well here’s the cheekiest bit of pricing of the year. And it’s from the same company.

Packard Bell launched the Easynote XS a few weeks ago and most people were pretty happy to see it announced for £349 pounds. It was a good price for most people. Not for PC World though who have just posted it up at a rather crazy £599. I guess they can do what they want with the pricing, especially if they have sole retail rights in the UK but should they really be hiding something in the order of 100% mark-up from the customers? I thought the average margin on notebooks was under 10% !! Lets hope they just made a mistake and got hold of the Euro price. Its expected in Germany at €599. Or does this mean is will also turn up at with the same mark-up to 1000 Euros?

Tony from Cynical Chatter isn’t happy either. Thanks for letting us know Tony.

The Sony UX1 (SSD version) in the UK is down to £831 at Expansys. A similar offer seems to be going out around the rest of their EU sites too. That’s a bargain for the SSD version of the most powerful UMPC you can buy (if you’ve got the eyes for such a tiny hi-res screen.) The last price I had for the UX1 was over 2000 pounds! Online retailers in Germany don’t seem to have responded yet as the price is still showing up at around 2000 Euros when it should be closer to 1500.

Offer spotted (and confirmed by a quick email exchange) at Expansys UK. Product details and review links here.

16 months have gone by since Averatec first talked about a UMPC and in March, as far as I can tell, they put up the ‘coming soon’ banner on their UMPC section in their website. It’s still there over 6 months later! The last we heard was ‘Q3’ and emails sent in July and August were unanswered although we did get a ‘maybe at Christmas time’ from one German employee. It could have been the cleaner though.

Mobility without boundaries? Obviously.

Tim Brown of VIA talks about sales models for IMP’s (Internet Media Players) and MIDs in the latest UML Weekly news broadcast. Its something I was keen to see for UMPCs too but I’m starting to realise why carriers are not picking up UMPCs. Support costs! There’s no way a carrier could support a Windows Vista or XP device like it does a mobile phone. There’s way to much to go wrong and carriers support costs rely on customer calls in the sub-minute band. Not the 60-minute band! The HTC […]

Just for a minute, lets take the battery from a couple of popular mobile devices and compare them. To the left here is a Nokia BP-5L as used in the ARM-based N800. It will give you 4 hours of Wifi-on surfing time on its 5Wh capacity. A Nokia-branded one costs a minimum 35 Euro. On the right is a spare battery for one of the biggest selling X86-based UMPCs,  the Samsung Q1. It will give you up to 3 hours of Wifi-on surfing time on its 30Wh capacity. A Samsung branded one will cost a minimum 103 Euros.

1.25W/hr vs 10w/hr. ARM wins!

10 Euro/hr vs 30 Euro/hr. ARM wins!

Speaking of ARM, I’m just reading through a very interesting article at ARS Technica. Jon Stokes has taken a good look at ARM vs X86. "The only company that seems to be betting solely on x86 is Intel." he says. When you look at the difference above, you realize how far away Intel is. Menlow will help, but not that much!

PC Magazine are obviously starting their Christmas campaigns now. They’ve just produced a list of the ‘best tech you can’t get.’ which is actually a very valid point. The Everun, SH8 and Flybook and E90 are in the list and I know that North American customers have problems finding these products because I end up with a lot of emails asking about where to buy them (hence the push to get resellers to share their info with me.) I’m making some progress now though and if you’re looking for a UMPC product, check out the resellers list. Recent additions include:

• Power Up Mobile (UK) UK-based reseller of mobile products.
• Trends Mobile
• Mobilx – Global Mobile tech reseller.
• ToDoUMPC – Based in Spain.
• UMPC Shop NL -Based in Holland.

I’m also working with Expansys / Mobile Planet at the moment to try and get links and info from their databases but there’s still a lot of work to do in general. I’m amazed at how difficult is to connect potential buyers to resellers in the UMPC world. Its like I’ve got a huge shop and can walk around demonstrating all the products to potential customers but I’m not able to actually tell them how much a product is and where they can actually buy it!

In addition to Mobile Planet and Dynamism, the resellers that partnered with PC Magazine on the article, you might want to also check out the Vye S37B which is the same device as the Kohjinsha SH8.

Resellers, please read this. It can help customers, you and me!

Via pocketables.

A quick check on local UMPC prices this evening revealed a new item. The HTC x9500 Shift. And its already being discounted! The official price is 1200 Euros but I’m already seeing it at one online retailer for 1140 Euro. Even Amazon.de have knocked 30 Euros off the recommended price.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there though. Amazon.de are selling it as a “Smartphone UMTS HSDPA Mobile Phone.” [my translation] Which is way, way off the mark. They’re also highlighting an unbelievable 2 days battery life in standby mode.’ Talk about spinning the specs!

There’s no delivery date given on any of the resellers sites yet but Amazon.de say 4-6 weeks. [Update: Expasnsys.de say 29th November for Germany] Maybe its due at the same time as the UK version that has actually slipped a little to the 20th of November according to UK importers Portix.com who, incidentally, have 1152 of them on order!

A few bits of info gleaned from the websites:

• It will ship with Origami experience.
• It will have the 20W battery.
• Manufactures code is 99HEC011-00 for UK, 99HEC010-00 for Germany.

Info from the German pricing site, Geizhals.at and the UK distributors site, Portix.
All the other info,links and images available through the HTC Shift product page and hopefully i’ll get some US-based info very soon. There’s been a complete lack of info for US customers. Poor show.