I just wanted to clear up a story that appeared on Engadget this morning. Yes, Flipstart are retreating from the ultra mobile PC market. I heard from a contact back in Jan that the Flipstart UMPC production was going to be reduced, sales and support handed over to Dynamism and that Flipstart were going to re-focus on MIDs and smartphones. Based on the current pressure in the mininote market, it’s probably not a bad move for a small company.

Apple may not refer to the iPod Touch as a MID, but it surely fits the definition, and is one of the best currently on the market. Today only, through the famous deal-a-day site Woot.com , you can pick up a refurbished 16GB iPod Touch for $289 (sorry, they only ship to the US). For the sake of price comparison, a new 16GB iPod Touch will run you $399, while a refurbished 16GB will cost you $329 direct from Apple. I’m not quite sure if the iPod being sold on […]

Danmiddle2 over at the Micropctalk.com forums has come up with a very clever controller solution for making mobile gaming on his VAIO UX more practical. Using a “Genius MaxFire Pandora Pro Foldable Mini USB Gamepad for PC”, Dan connected the two halves of the USB controller back to back. He then mounted the connected pieces to a dummy CF card (pictured here), using the CF slot as the mechanism in which to secure the controller. The controller then conveniently plugs into the USB slot right above the CF card slot. […]

Jenn from Pocketables.net got to preview Origami 2.0 while playing with her new HTC Shift. The Shift is the first ultra mobile PC to ship with Origami 2.0, which is otherwise not released to the public at this point. If you will recall, the first Origami was essentially an application launcher and media manager designed to be finger optimized for small first-gen ultra mobile PC screens. It was met with a mixed reaction, some people enjoyed the interface while others found it useless. Back in January, the Origami Project blog […]

Coming to you live on 1700Mhz, its UMTS data at 356kbps. on the T-Mobile network. As far as I’m concerned, UMTS speeds aren’t bad for browsing and email which keeps 99% of users happy for 99% of the time. The problem is when you want to download a big file or, even worse, upload something. In that case you’re down to analogue modem speeds which isn’t much fun at all, especially when its an important document. Don’t forget that 3G data transmissions take a huge amount of power though. In […]

No, its’s not another new member, its just me wanting to say an official ‘welcome’ to Thorsten, (AKA The_Niles) and Ben (AKA Benz145) and to mention the other team members that are working with me at the moment. Andre (Lyser) and Sascha, who joined us on the podcast last week, are going to be taking a look at UMPCPortal.de over the next few weeks to try and get that going for our German-speaking guests. Pdiddy is still working hard in the forums and Elliot (Arielviews007) is doing all sorts of […]

Hello everyone, I’m Ben AKA Benz145 from the US. I’ve been following the ultra mobile PC world ever since I bought the first US available Sony VAIO UX (the UX180p). Looking for a community for UX users, I stumbled upon micropctalk.com. At the time, the site was mostly overrun by spam and didn’t have many active users. I appealed to the admin of the site to help clean the place up, and shortly after I was posting news and moderating the forums. I’m proud to say that Micropctalk became an […]

There have been a lot of changes on UMPCPortal in the last few weeks. The migration to the WordPress blog is the most visual of these but perhaps more important in the long run are the addition of new team members. You might have spotted that some of the recent news items have not been made by either Steve or Kornel. As newcomers let’s introduce ourselves.