Its Friday, I have some cool beers n the fridge and a new ultra mobile PC to unbox. If you fancy joining me, asking questions or just watching the live video and chat from the sidelines I’m happy to host a live session. As I mentioned, I have the new Gigabyte M704 UMPC which has just arrived in Europe at Mobilx (aff.) and I also have Ubuntu Mobile Running on the Q1 Ultra UMPC. As usual, i’ll try and answer all your ultra mobile PC questions, just don’t leave it […]

Here I am siting in the middle of town outside a cafe drinking a nice Cappucino and I’m not using the Q1 Ultra. In fact I haven’t used the Q1 Ultra for about a week now – ever since I installed Ubuntu Mobile on it. Ubuntu Mobile works fine and the Firefox browser is stable and fast but for some reason I keep picking up the Everun. I’m not sure if its because if the lack of WOW! factor with UME (its not built for end users, rather for OEMs […]

Despite my definition of a ultra mobile PC reaching up to 10″ devices, I never call the netbooks UMPCs! Maybe it’s because the term ‘netbook’ say something about the low-end features rather than the size. In the podcasts, we’ve been talking a lot about how small the 701, 900 and 901 are compared to the other netbooks but it’s not until you see an image like this that you realise the real difference. To most people it’s nothing. Both require a bag. But if you’re on a plane, in a […]

Java, Brew, Symbian, Adobe Air, Android, Moblin, .Net, Windows Mobile, Flash Lite, AJAX, iPhone. The mobile software development process is complex and full of choices. Too many for me to understand. I gave up software development when I was about 25 after spending way to many nights coding in C and looking up from the keyboard to see daylight. I have so many unanswered questions on the topic that I really don’t feel qualified enough to even start to write an article on it. Take those keywords at the top […]

Tim Brown of VIA’s marketing group shows the insides of the OpenBook in this video and explains one of the important features, the dual PCI-Express Mini slots. Having two slots means that it’s easy for OEMs to offer multiple versions of the device with very little effort. Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G and even Wimax cards can be added to offer customers exactly what they need in different parts of the world.   Click image for our up-to-date OpenBook datasheet.

Despite Samsung reporting just a few weeks ago that a MID will come ‘sooner or later’ and there only being 11 days left in June, Aving are reporting that Qualcomm are saying (ahem, not exactly first hand news this is it!) that Samsung will release a MID in June 2008. The quoted specs included a 1Ghz ARMv7 which is going to be very fast indeed. ARMv7 is the ARM-licensed architecture used inside the Cortex-based processors which are said to be four times as fast as current ARM architectures for the […]

One of the members here, Hanno, has just been reminding me of a netbook from 2005 that would still raise eyebrows today had it not been killed-off over two years ago. With a beautiful design and an 8.9″ 1024×600 screen, Intel Pentium-M 1.1Ghz processor and up to 768MB of RAM and running XP the JVC XP741 was way ahead of its time. Yes there were other ‘netbook’ devices around but none of them had the style of this one. When it launched, the XP741 from JVC cost over 2000 Euro […]

Forward Concepts, the company that last week produced one of the first detailed studies on a ‘Mobile Internet Device’ product category have been interviewed by Electronics Supply and Manufacturing about the report and have brought some good questions and information about the segment to the surface. For example, I didn’t know (or had I forgotten?) that HP are developing a MID, that Qualcomm are working on 15 products and that TI are working on ‘at least a dozen.’ I don’t expect that all of these designs will reach the market […]