John Hill, the CEO of Allegiance Tablet PC Experts has blogged a nice list of things to think about when looking at the choice between hard drive and SSD. I have the Raon Digital Everun note 24GB SSD version in front of me right now for a hands-on article I’m writing on and its interesting to read and think about some of the points he’s made while I do my testing. Take this one for example. When failures occur, they tend to occur either ‘on write’, or ‘on erase’, rather […]

To all the websites, companies and visitors that I’ve learned so much from in the last few years, here’s something back. The 5-part, 11,000 word, 28-page Ultra Mobile Computing Buyers Guide as a single re-flowable PDF file. Click the image to download the PDF.  (850kB) (Right-Click and choose ‘Save Link As’ to save direct to  your PC)

I’ve already posted about this, twice. Samsung have some great engineers. I had the chance to look at an NC10 (#1 device on the portal right now) at the netbook meeting in Cologne on Saturday and the first thing I did was to measure the minimum drain of the device. Within minutes, I was seeing a fantastic sub-5W minimum drain. This is lower than on most UMPCs and is a good indication that the electronics on the motherboard, the power components and the screen are well engineered. There’s no point […]

Smaller memory footprint, faster boot, better UI and longer battery life. Windows 7 is not only going to be interesting for the laptop and desktop, it’s shaping up well for Netbooks and UMPCs too. Vista always offered better touch and natural input mechanisms but it was a struggle to run it on Ghz-class devices. The reports coming back from Windows 7 pre-beta testers point towards a much more usable system on these devices. I’ve put a few links to some early reports below but the one I wanted to concentrate […]

…and thats just the ones I caught on video. There are at least 25 devices here. There’s a live video and chat (Mostly German) going on at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/netbook-news Thanks to eee-pc.de and eeepcnews.de for organising the event.

Fennec, the small-screen version of Firefox, is important for ultra mobile fans. Not just because its a small-screen, finger-optimised browser but because it has been chosen as one of the browser options (the other being Firefox 3) for Moblin 2, the latest version of the Intel-led core operating system for MIDs planned for first release in Spring 2009. Fennec has support for add-ons but unfortunately, it doesn’t support the mainstream add-ons that are available for the Daddy of the pack, Firefox 3. Thank goodness people are starting to jump on […]

Welcome to Part 4 of the Ultra Mobile Computing Buyers Guide. The final part is titled ‘Additional Information and further reading’ and ties up the lose ends by going over some of the less commonly found features. We also give you a big reading list. We feel we’ve done a good job on it and covered a lot of ground and a good level of detail but if you want to see additional content or make corrections, please let us know in the comments below. We’ll consider adding it to […]

Where would netbooks be without Windows XP? Probably nowhere, so why have Dell decided to combine the low-power Atom Z-series with Windows Vista on their new 12" laptop? There’s two reasons. 1 – To save a few watts/degrees/mm 2 – To enable a high-end video experience APCMag and LaptopMag have both done some reviewing and its hard to see any reasoning behind Dells move because neither of the reviews shine. 3hrs battery life and sluggish performance are nothing to write home about, even if the device uses a smaller battery. […]