Engagdet got a nice little present yesterday – details on the Dell ‘E’ PC. Very interesting specs, a large standard battery and a range of SSD configurations. It hardly looks like its for ‘developing countries’ though! More the Eee PC killer methinks. There are going to be three versions of the 8.9" version, all with different SSD sizes and with the possibility of a webcam and Bluetooth. Prices will start at $299 and the launch target is, as we heard before, August. This will certainly compete well with the HP, […]

JKK, Sascha and I review the main MID, ultra mobile PC and netbook news that came out of Computex. We talk about the top players in the netbook market, pricing and the new platforms from VIA and AMD. Its another long podcast that could have been much longer! Direct download: MP3, 48 Minutes, 33MB Subscribe to the Ultra Mobile Podcast RSS Feed

Kornel, Ben and I have summarised our thoughts on the iPhone 3G. I think we all agree it’s a MID but the contract pricing seems to be the sticking-point. Kornel This is the iPhone many were waiting for. Here’s what I’m excited about: improved speaker, 3g speeds and…the GPS. I haven’t yet seen an implementation of GPS in a phone that I would like. But this is Apple. Location awareness, Geotagging – all that built in and user friendly. No wonder the GPS makers are scared. Great price and I […]

Acer have a big advantage in the netbook race. Pre-established sales channels and partners. The Aspire One is already showing up in price comparison engines in Germany with the base model being advertised for 329 Euro (8GB, Linux, 512MB) which is just 50 Euro more than the Eee PC 701 4G! The high-end Linux model (80GB, 1GB) for 399 Euro which is 40 Euro less than the ‘old’ and less equipped Eee PC 900. Availability looks like 4-7 weeks although one reseller is quoting 10 days. Because of its size […]

One of the most popular MIDs on UMPCPortal, the Gigabyte M528, looks like it might be one of the first to launch and at a far more attractive price than we’d previously heard. Official information at Computex and sent directly to us from Gigabyte today was that the specifications remain unchanged. We’re still looking at an impressive, pocketable combination of 800×480 touchscreen, 3mp auto-focus cam and 4GB SSD on 800Mhz Silverthorne/Poulsbo (Menlow) with integrated GPS and 3G modules all controlled from the Moblin-based software with it’s ‘Merry-go-round’ user interface. A […]

Phew! I was beginning to think that the bottom had dropped out of the MID launch-effort but it seems that the activity was just hidden behind a mountain of increasingly-difficult-to-get-excited-about netbook news.  JKKMobile continued to track ultra mobile PC news coming out of Computex while I was away and I also found a nice clutch of photos from Steve at Fortune Fountain, the DialKeys people, in my inbox. Read on for the the full article.

Origami Experience 2, or OX2 as Origami Project calls it, is the second version of Microsoft’s touch orientated software for UMPCs, and if you can’t wait for its release, swing by the Windows Vista Experience blog for a preview of OX2’s RSS features. The RSS reader in OX2 allows for easy subscriptions to RSS feeds from any site. Your feed list across IE and the Origami reader will be common. So if you subscribe to something in IE it will also appear in your OX2 feed list, and vice-versa. Podcasts […]

As you have most likely heard, Apple today announced the iPhone 3G at their annual WWDC event. The phone’s most obvious new feature is the HSDPA 3G cellular data connection that now enables the phone to have faster cellular internet connectivity. This replaces the old iPhone’s EDGE technology which was on the dial-up end of the internet speed spectrum. HSDPA in the iPhone 3G is closer to wi-fi speeds as demonstrated by Apple. The phone itself has changed very little cosmetically. We’re talking about millimeters in size differences, and a […]