The Belinea S.Book 1, AKA the Cloudbook CE1200V, was a device that surprised both myself and JKK at CeBIT. It was better looking than we imagined and the specs stand out as being a cut-above your average cheap laptop. With the touchscreen, the 80GB drive and the 1GB RAM, it can really hold it’s own in the mobile productivity league and with a price of under 600 Euros in most EU countries, its a bargain too! Below you’ll see a video that I made with JKK at CeBIT. JKK talks about the device and goes over the main features. Underneath that there’s a video from Cindy, the UMPCPortal-sponsored S.Book owner in Holland. While the video quality isn’t the best, it does show the boot-up time (after the install of a number of packages) and how quickly Office 2003 Word and Excel start. Thanks Cindy, for making the video.

I’ve just listened to the Podtech.net interview with Pat Gelisnger, Senior Vice President and Digital Enterprise Group co-General Manager. How about this for a quote:

In the milliwatt range we want to literally turn every cellphone into a fully capable Internet communications device able to access every piece of content application plugins that have ever been done in a compatible way and that’s really the value proposition of IA but for the first time coming to mobile devices.

If you’re not interested in IDF but have maybe a passing interest in mobile communications, of any sort, stay tuned over the next three days!

I won’t wait until the 1st April to post this!

March was a big month for UMPCPortal. We hit 1 million page views across the news, forums, gallery, river of links, product database and RSS feeds which is a major accomplishment for a single month. Of course, CeBIT helped a lot but there does seem to be an underlying swell of UMPC activity as people begin to realise that while Origami-style UMPCs might not have been their bag, the cheap 7″ laptop and 5″ pocketable devices are! Confidence by manufacturers and advances in technology have enabled both of those sub segments and as the world starts to go 3, 3.5 and 4G mobile, the sub 1KG productivity and consumer pocketable categories will become more and more important. The Macbook AIR also played a role too. While it appeared as an underpowered styling exercise to early commentators, owners have unanimously voted that the mobility factor has to be experienced to be understood. [more stats after the jump…]

Laptopmag reports that the XP version of the Eee PC 4G is on it’s way. They’ve had hands-on too but I’m wondering how that will fit in the market with the 8.9″ version that’s supposed to be coming out soon. $399 will buy you the 7″ XP version which is $100 more than the Linux version but if you work back from the Euro-prices talked about for the 9″ version – 499 Euro – we should see the 8.9″ version with Linux for around $500 in the U.S. If I had waited this long to buy an Eee PC and was looking for ‘productivity’ I’d probably wait a few more weeks for the  bigger screen (and, as I understand it, more storage and rumors of Bluetooth and multi-touch track-pad) rather than the XP operating system. However, $500 is a lot more than $400 and the difference will be too much for some people.

Eee PC 701, 900 Specs side-by-side.

Back at the beginning of this month I wrote about Cindy in Holland. She was customer challenge #5 and I had agreed to give her some sponsorship money towards a Belinea S.Book in return for some reports. She was very quick in sending me her initial review on the device but I haven’t had the time to post it until now. Remember that the  Belinea S.Book [details] is the 1Gb/80GB, touchscreen version of the VIA Nanobook reference design and will be almost exactly the same as the Everex Cloudbook CE1200J. Cindy is Dutch so English is obviously not her first language but I’ve left the review almost untouched apart from some formatting and few spelling corrections. Take it away Cindy…

I’m back at my desk after a swift tour in the UK last week, a place that appears to be home to one of the most advanced mobile Internet industries I’ve seen recently. My home country of Germany is certainly no laggard when it comes to offering high-speed Internet over 3.5G networks but the UK is a big step ahead. Everywhere you go on the high-street there are promotions and advertising for ‘mobile broadband’ which is the carriers way of trying to pull in DSL and cable customers with the promise of the mobility factor. 10 pounds a month gets you a 2 year contract with a free ‘dongle’ on a 3G network 15 per month nets you 3.6mbps access. Even the pay-as-you-go offerings are good. Its very consumer focused now and seems to have moved on from business-level marketing.

I’m on the last day of my mini-holiday in the UK and have been trying to catch up with feeds and email before I dive back into full-time UMPC work on Monday but one thing I couldn’t leave until next week was a mention of the new specs that Engadget have on the HP 2133 UMPC. [Right. Click to Enlarge]

Its good to see some confirmation that it really is VIA-based and that it will have a DX9-capable chipset. Probably the VX800. The size and weight figures look a bit suspicious and might just be shipping figures so I’d ignore them for the time being.

The disk sizes indicate an 8mm 1.8″ drive and its nice to see it support up to 2GB of RAM.

I’m disappointed not to see a Bluetooth module in the low-end devices and no HSDPA option but I think there’s a lot of potential market spread in this product and I’m sure we’re going to see Isaiah-based versions of this with some great additional specifications. What we see here is probably only the start of a big range of devices.

I wasn’t able to get these specs confirmed but to me, they do look reasonable and tally with my initial estimate of pricing and target market.

Tracking details of the HP 2133 UMPC in the database here.

Wow, that was certainly unexpected. The FCC leaked the new EEE 900 manual which reveals that Asus stuck in some sort of a multi-touch trackpad. It appears to only take two fingers though, so it wont do three finger swipes. I am wondering if I did the right thing as I just ordered something else with a multi-touch trackpad (more about that later) though considering the price of the EEE I can probably have both. As expected no Atom processor. More x-rated pics over at jkkmobile.

FCC via jkkmobile via engadget.