First of all, let me thank Pankaj Kedia and Intel for giving us an hour of undivided attention at CeBIT. Combined with the information I got at the other Intel events it was very helpful in understanding the future of Atom and MIDs and I’ve managed to build up a good picture of what Atom is all about. In this article, I try and explain what’s I understand and what the current Atom and MID plan is. Lets talk about Silverthorne, Diamondville, Atom, Centrino, MIDs, Moblin and UMPCs.

In summary, Silverthorne and Diamondville are completely new, very small, very power efficient CPUs that will be combined with other Intel silicon (Silverthorne will be combined with the Poulsbo chipset, Diamondville with an unknown chipset – possibly the 945GSE.) to form power efficient and low-cost computing platforms. Silverthorne+Poulsbo will form the lower power, smaller platform. Diamondville+945GSe will form the lower cost, slightly larger, slightly more power-hungry platform. Both of the CPU’s are now called ‘Atom’ CPUs but those devices using Silverthorne and confirming to some sizing guidelines are eligible to be approved as Centrino devices.
[More after the break…]

I have three navigation programs that I use on my PC and UMPCs. PC Navigator, Sygic and Autoroute. All three of them have now been made totally redundant by Nokia Maps 2.0 on my N82 smartphone. Its doesn’t quite have the screen information that you’d get by using a ultra mobile PC but the fact that it is always with me, net-connected and personal makes it far far more useful. I doubt I will ever go back to a dedicated or PC-based navigation system now. There are two other features […]

Sorry everybody for the outage today. Service is recovering slowly as my provider re-populates their network-attached storage array after a big outage last night.

Coming up later I’ve got a big post about Atom and the Intel MID ecosystem. As soon as the server is stable, i’ll post!

Steve ‘Chippy’

Something had to give last week. Despite two of us hitting CeBIT (representing UMPCPortal and JKKMobile) there was a serious lack of time to get much posting done. UMPCPortal was my primary blogging platform and Carrypad suffered which is a real shame because my heart is so much more with consumer Internet devices than 7″ mini-notes. I think I can summarise by saying that for me, CeBIT split into two threads. The mini-note thread (boosted by the Eee PC 900 announcement) and the Intel mobile Internet devices thread. It’s the […]

I’m sorry everyone. UMPCPortal is down due to a storage array problem that has hit my hosting service. Feel free to browse Carrypad although some of the images here are served by the same server as UMPCPortal! Steve ‘Chippy’ View details of all Ultra Mobile devices in the ultra mobile PC product database. From N800 to Flybook V5, its all there!

Click to Play JKKMobile and UMPCPortal hands-on with the Eee PC 900 at CeBIT 2008. Formats available: Windows Media (.wmv), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v) Tags: umpc, eeepc

Last week at CeBIT I had the chance to handle the LG UMPC a couple of times. In both cases, unfortunately, the device wasn’t turned on so it was impossible to see how Vista runs but based on other tests I did last week (ASUS R50 and ASUS R70), a clean Vista build on a 1.6Ghz or 1.8Ghz version of the Silverthorne processor should be about as fast as what we’re seeing on devices like the HTC Shift and Kohjinsha SH8. What I was able to do though was to get a feel for the device’s ergonomics. [read the full post after the break]

We all love when new toys devices arrive. I had the pleasure of unboxing a brand new Orange UK branded HTC Shift yesterday. I planned on filming it, but unfortunately I’m sick and wasn’t able to. To make up for it I wrote up some of my thoughts. Sorry for writing in such an unorganized format.
Here’s what you need to know:

[more after the break…]