While many of us are waiting for Cortex-based mobile Internet devices to appear in late 2008, there is one little stepping stone that could form an impressive bridge into the next-gen for ARM-based devices. Its the multi-core capable ARM11 architechture (MPCore.) A little research reveals that up to four cores can be combined to produce some impressive processor performance figures. Think 4 Nokia N810 cores working together! Nvidia have taken it a step further though and licensed the architecture from ARM to built a system on chip, the APX 2500, […]

I’ve just had a peek at the Everex Cloudbook documentation. There is no Bluetooth on this model. I had suspected that but was rather hoping that I was wrong.

Is this going to affect buyers choices? I’ve heard people that say that Bluetooth will go the way of IrDA but personally I use Bluetooth for DUN tethering and for picture transfer from my N82 and can’t see a low-power, user-friendly replacement for that.

Via CloudbookUMPC.com who are doing a good job of keeping people updated on the Cloudbook. If you’re researching the Cloudbook, be sure to check the site out.

More Cloudbook info and links here.

Via a blog from the designer of the rather cool looking ‘Cuppa’ UMPC (right) I’ve been taking a look through the designs in the Microsoft Next-Gen PC design competition.

Many of the designs feature touch, small form factor and personalisation but all of them are worth looking at in order to stimulate thoughts about UMPCs designs. One’s that stand out for me are the solar-powered Backpackers Diary, and the Touch Horizon which incorporates foldable and flexbible touch screens and got my vote. You can vote for your favorite until March 15th.

Via Ben Arent’s blog (designer, Cuppa)

Linpus. Lunpus. Where have I heard that name before? CES, i’m sure……No. Here it is, a video demo from last year that JKKMobile picked up. There’s also a stack of news about this from CES. At GottaBeMobile for example.

Linpus Lite is a ‘new’ distribution from a Taiwanese company has a dual-mode easy/advanced user interface and is targeted at 4-7″ screens.

Linpus Linux Lite is our latest OS development for low-cost PCs like UMPC, OLPC, Classmate PC, MID and other consumer mobile devices. This new version of Linpus Linux distribution is designed to run smoothly and reliably on a lower-end hardware with processing power as low as 500 MHz, 128MB of DRAM and 512MB of storage space. With Linpus Linux Lite, you can surf the web, edit documents and photos, read e-book and email, play the music and games, enjoy the GPS navigation and VoIP service, etc.

Linux Watch took a closer look at the distro recently and there’s a nice quote in there from the Linupus sales and marketing people: “Specifically, we provide unprecedented levels of support for hardware vendors —- and we recently pioneered our own preload solution and have worked extremely hard to create stable sleep and suspend modes for notebooks,” Checking through some details on the Linpus website I see has touchscreen support. I’ve tried a number of distros in the past where the touchscreen didn’t work so this is interesting. I guess that’s my work sorted out for today. Where’s that Q1 P gone….

Discussion in the Linux/UMP forum. Anyone tested it yet? I’ve done some testing but full hardware support isn’t there yet. See forum for more details.

Update: The ISO download is crawling. Could take days to download. If anyone has a copy that they can upload to my server for re-distribution among UMPCPortal members, please contact me.

Update: I have a Linux Live CD distribution now. Available for members via the download link in the comments below.

Via Linux Devices.

There’s definitely more of a buzz about the Cloudbook than there was with the Packard Bell  Easynote XS20 in Nov last year. Its the same device, just running different software. I’m sure people aren’t actually buzzed about having gOS so I guess it’s the price. We all love a bargain!

If you get one today, as Bjorn at UltraMobillife said, be sure to shoot an unboxing video and let the world know. We’d also love to hear from you in the forum too. Does it have Bluetooth installed and how much space is free on the disk? First Cloudbook unboxing post and first thoughts post in the forum gets a $20 Amazon voucher. (Click image for Cloudbook/Easynote forum.)

Oh, BTW, has anyone got a Belinea S.Book yet? A UKP10 voucher for the first to post unboxing and first impressions in the forum. It’s Friday, what the hell!

According to Google Analytics, since I put up the product page about the HTC Shift nearly a year ago (wow! That long?) over 113,000 different people have looked at it. Its far and away the most popular device on the portal over the last year and even now, it’s rising in popularity again over all other UMPCs.
Yes, Google Analytics probably registers IP addresses which might not be a correct representation of the actual numbers of people but even half of that figure is quote impressive for such a niche product.

What is it that makes the HTC Shift so interesting? Is it just the looks or is it the feature-set? Is there something we can learn from it?
Personally I always thought that a mini-shift (4.8″ display) would be a winner and if the response to the Xperia ( a similar high-design slider product) is anything to go by, the style-slider is easily going to be the most stimulating form-factor for a MID in the future. No wonder the LG X-Note is notcing up a similar rate of views!

In a recent moblogging test I was rather shocked to hear my smartphone sound the low-battery warning sound after only 45 minutes on the go! I was playing music, doing a live GPS track and running an IM program at the same. No calls, no gaming, no web surfing! While I was out, I blogged about the problem (from my UMPC.) Yes I was pretty annoyed and you’ll see that from the text. I should have known better because I’ve seen this problem before. Only a few weeks earlier I […]

I’ve just read a short article about a ‘speed-up’ tip that involves using alternative DNS servers fro OpenDNS. If you want my advise (I was an IP network design engineer for many ISP’s over many years) this isn’t going to make any difference at all. 1) Your ISP DNS servers are normally the closest servers to your PC.2) DNS lookups take, on average 20-40ms. A slow resolver might take 100ms. If you reduced that to zero, for 5 DNS lookups per web-page, you’re still not saving anything compared to the […]