The most impressive video playback I’ve seen so far on a UMPC is a 6mbps WMV9 HD 720 video file on a Samsung Q1P but according to this video from Shogmaster, the Q1 Ultra Premium will, unsurprisingly I suppose, play back even higher resolutions and bitrates. It’s a shame that the quality can’t be seen on a crappy YouTube conversion but I don’t doubt the figures at all.

I wonder if the Q1 Ultra Premium would be able to return decent Video encoding rates too. Could it be the first video-editing capable UMPC? Its stirred my interest somewhat. Especially if I can drop an HSDPA modem into it. One thing I would have loved to have seen after that video test had run is the battery life figure!

More info on the Q1 Ultra Premium here.

A couple of things to pick up from this great video from our friends at Mini-PC-Pro. Firstly, they are hoping to ship in Q2 which kind of goes against the grain in terms of news about the mobile-itx release date. The last I heard from VIA, just a month ago, was that it was on track which means it should be going into production fairly soon. I’ll check with VIA on that one though.

Secondly, its just so much smaller than Menlow-based products. The mobo in that could, I think, enable smartphone-style designs rather than the 4+” designs we’ve seen from Intel this week. Pretty amazing stuff.

Via Technovoyance.

Its CES wind-down time and in the penultimate CES UMPC and MID podcast (we’ll do a round-up over the weekend) we talk, again, a little about the UMPC and MID terms and how the definition has been changed this week. We cover the Hanbit (ex-Pepper) hardware, Q1 Ultra Premium and break some new news (its good!) about the Amtek U560.

Listen or download the MP3, 22 minutes, 20MB here.

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The Pepper Pad hardware is still one of my favorite in-home browsing devices. Its a good,comfortable size, has a solid, slightly ruggedised build and best of all, it has the great split keyboard and the scrollbar. Now that Pepper seem to be re-focusing, Hanbit, the hardware partner for Pepper, appear to be free to offer the hardware with any operating system. They’re even working on upgrading the old AMG Geode-based platform to Intel Menlow which is excellent news. I’ve had the info for a while but haven’t been permitted to release it but now that Hanbit have gone public at CES I can bring you the news. Or rather, direct you over to Pocketables.net where Jenn has some images of the device along with specifications.

I will add that Hanbit will probably offer the hardware with the original AMD platform and XP as a first step but thats not 100% yet. I was in touch with Hanbit last month about this and a review model has already been promised.

The original Pepper Pad information (Images and a full review) are available here.

Its been difficult to keep up with all the devices launched at CES but I think I’ve managed to get on top of it now. Here’s a list of all the UMPC and MID devices that appeared at CES 2008. Click on the images for the specification and info (as much as we know at the moment) along with links out to the related news.

There are a number of other devices that I don’t have enough info on at the moment but will be added to the database when I get it.

• Clarion.
• LiteOn. Disguised as a DVD buner perhaps! We havent seen this one at CES yet.
• Toshiba. Thats this one.
• USI. Slider.
• Willcom. No information yet.
• Quanta. Quanta are an OED. Any of the branded MIDS could be a Quanta design.
• Compal. Compal are an OED. Any of the branded MIDS could be a Compal design.

What’s you favorite so far?

One of the more attractive UMPCs we’ve seen in the last few days has been the ASUS R50A. Its bigger than we expected, with a 5.6″ screen and it’s a fairly high-spec device. GottaBeMobile’s Rob Bushway and Kathy Sierra got some hands-on time with it and shot a video which i’ve just made some notes on. Read on…

The Pocketsurefer2 is probably one of the most mobile and most Internet focused devices there is. In fact, its the only thing it does and I’ve heard it said before that Pocketsurfer can download almost any web page in under 10 seconds which is pretty impressive seeing as most smartphones take, on average, double that time. Even some of the UMPCs can take longer than that. Note that this is a visual-only Internet experience. There’s no sound or video support and all traffic is routed through proxy servers which may […]

At this stage in CES its seems to be impossible to talk through the latest news in less than 25 minutes. Yes, there’s lots to talk about and we go over the latest UMPC and MID news from ASUS, LG Gigabyte, Viliv and Everex. We have a little discussion about the MID/UMPC terms and finally, give an indication of our favorite devices so far.

Listen or download the MP3, 26 minutes, 24MB here.

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