Sascha Pallenberg

George Kuan of Freescale on Smartbooks during the Linux Forum 2009 – "Smartbooks are always connected" #smartbooks #netbooks

11 hours ago from Twitter

Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine

Computex 2009 Intel MIDS – http://www.umpcportal.com/gallery…

9 hours ago from Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) image…

Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine

Compal KAX-15 Menlow-based MID. Info and JKK’s Video. Coming via Aigo? – http://www.umpcportal.com/2009…

8 hours ago from UMPCPortal

Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine

Viliv X70 in case. – http://www.flickr.com/photos…

8 hours ago from Flickr

James Kendrick

This Week at Mobile Tech Manor #42: UMPCs Everywhere – http://jkontherun.com/2009…

5 hours ago from jkOnTheRun

Rob Bushway

Nothing like playing Flight Control on iPhone while you are on a plane. New version rocks. #fb

5 hours ago from Twitter

jkkmobile

Inventec Moorestown MID at Computex – http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009…

5 hours ago from jkkmobile

jkkmobile

Asus Eee PC T91 with multitouch screen – http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009…

5 hours ago from jkkmobile

Kevin C. Tofel

Acer Android Netbooks Will Include Windows After All – http://jkontherun.com/2009…

3 hours ago from jkOnTheRun

jkkmobile

Hands-on with Nvidia Tegra platform on netbook – http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009…

2 hours ago from jkkmobile

Kevin C. Tofel

Pre Inventory Levels are Lower Than Low in my Area – http://jkontherun.com/2009…

2 hours ago from jkOnTheRun

Kevin C. Tofel

Do Three I’s and Two Devices Equal One Happy Camper? – http://jkontherun.com/2009…

1 hour ago from jkOnTheRun

Rob Bushway

Guy next to me on airplane has sony ereader, me kindle 2..fight!! The winner? Me…i just bought a book while waiting for the doors to close

1 hour ago from Twitter

Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine

sitting at Hong Kong airport messing with the x70. i like it better than the s5 so far. more productive. video quality is stunning.

1 hour ago from Twitter

———-

You posted a message

“Initial impressions of the Asus Eee PC 1000H.”

2 hours ago – Comment – Like – Hide – More

Michael W. May and MiniMage liked this

Keyboard is great. Slightly smaller than the Samsung Q1 external keyboard. Even then, the keys are relatively large and has a nice feel. – You (edit | delete)

Touchpad buttons are stiff. I’m beginning to tap the touch pad for a left click more since it causes less strain on my wrists. Multitouch scrolling in the browser is fantastic. Very much like a MacBook. – You (edit | delete)

How’s your spacebar? – Lora Heiny

Display is bright thanks to LED backlight. I’m using the 4th notch from the left to save battery life. The bezel is a bit large. Probably could have fit an 11″ screen. Would still like 1280×768 resolution but at 1024×600, reading text is nice. – You (edit | delete)

Battery life so far is fantastic. Under normal usage, can probably get around 4-5 hours. With intense CPU/LAN/hard drive usage, probably around 3-4 hours. – You (edit | delete)

Performance is ok. It’s faster than the Intel A110 800Mhz chip in the previous generation of UMPC’s, but not by much. I’m assuming most of the performance gains are coming from the faster RAM and 5400 RPM SATA2 hard drive. I ran an initial benchmark with CrystalMark. I will run another test when I replace the memory with a 2GB CAS 4 stick and 320GB 5400RPM WD Scorpio drive when they arrive tomorrow. – You (edit | delete)

Boot up time.. It’s ok. It’s not much of a factor to me since I use Sleep Mode all the time. Time to sleep when closing the lid is very fast. Within a few seconds. It’s disappointing it doesn’t come out of sleep when opening the lid. You have have to press the power button to wake. It’s fast coming out of sleep. – You (edit | delete)

@Lora: The spacebar feels very nice. There is a little bit of travel on all the keys, but overall, it’s very very comfortable. There’s no real difference clicking the spacebar from the left or right side.. The construction is solid. – You (edit | delete)

Audio. The speaker volume is low. It’s kind of cool that is has environmental effects, but I usually ignore them. – You (edit | delete)

plug in a headphones and it works fine. You will get prompted for how you want the plug to be used BTW. – Christopher Welle

I’m still not sure what the ‘Super Hybrid Engine’ does. I assume it reduces or overclocks the CPU but I haven’t noticed any changes when observing the CPU speed and power usage with Notebook Hardware Control. – You (edit | delete)

The dedicated resolution switching button is very handy. There will be times when an app will require minimum 1024×768. – You (edit | delete)

The webcam quality is not bad at all. I’m not totally convinced this chipset can handle full 30fps 1.3 megapixel video, but for streaming through Ustream/Seesmic/etc, it should be fine. – You (edit | delete)

Love that you fit a whole review here. Keep it coming. – Andrew Warner

So if you review here on FriendFeed, what will you have for the blog? Will you capture everything you reviewed and post it on your blog? Using FriendFeed to answer any questions that are added to the blog? – Christopher Welle

Just asking because its a interesting thought to do posts with instant feedback that you can add to the blog post later. – Christopher Welle

The power drain is interesting. It hovers around -10-12W drain. Up to around -15W when plugging in USB devices. I would think the Atom processor would account for a lot more battery saving but it doesn’t seem significantly more efficient than the A110. The 10″ display and 5400RPM hard drive are the main factors for relatively high power drain. I’m sure running Vista will gain more battery life since its power management is much better. – You (edit | delete)

Haha thanks for answering the question for me. I’ll most likely, copy/paste this post to my blog instead. I find it more comfortable to write in spurts rather than stress out on a whole post. – You (edit | delete)

Kind of like taking notes with a live audience then edit it into something else afterwards. – Christopher Welle

Wheres the pictures? – Christopher Welle

Pictures will come later. I’ll do some comparison shots with a MacBook, Fujitsu U810, Samsung Q1, and any other devices that are around. – You (edit | delete)

Heat. Not bad at all. The only real warm spot is where the hard drive sits. I have no problems with this sitting on my bed without a laptop cooler thingy. NHC shows the HD around 50 degrees C. CPU at around 55-60 C. – You (edit | delete)

I’m missing the touchscreen. Sometimes it’s a pain to try to be accurate with the touchpad. I’m catching myself wanting to just click the screen or move the scroll bars with my finger. – You (edit | delete)

Well, I’m sure I’ll post more comments later. For now, at around $450 + shipping, this little Netbook is a great deal. – You (edit | delete)

link to where you bought it. – Christopher Welle

http://www.amazon.com/1000H-10… – You (edit | delete)

I bought it off Amazon and TigerDirect was the lowest priced seller at the time at $469. I paid $30 for 2 days shipping. They are out of state so no sales tax. It came in 2 days . I also recommend buying from Newegg . The only reason I didn’t go there was because they were out of stock at the time. The one I have has an 80GB hard drive. It doesn’t matter to me since I’m replacing the hard drive. If you want to run it out of the box, the new ones come with a 160 GB hard drive. http://www.amazon.com/1000H-Di… – You (edit | delete)

First 5×5 Vignette. It was a very windy day so I took some footage of some plants & trees blowing in the wind.

Shot from Canon TX1 at 720P. The audio had a lot of wind noise even though I turned on the wind filter. It was ridiculously windy though so it was expected. My hat flew off twice during this time.

I did an experiment in post. Edited this with my 800Mhz Fujitsu U810 UMPC using Sony Vegas. While editing, the preview screen couldn’t really keep up but it wasn’t actually too bad editing HD footage on such a slow computer. I’m somewhat glad now that the Canon TX1 encodes to MJPEG. If it encoded to H.264, there would be no way I would be able to edit it since H.264 is so processor intensive.

I ended up encoding the final product to 720P WMV. It took 54 minutes to encode 25 seconds worth of footage.

I doubt I will edit HD footage on a UMPC in the near future, but it’s nice to know it’s even possible.

Download WMV from Vimeo page – 1280×720 30FPS (99MB)

jabancroft World Exclusive: I got to play with the Lenovo and Aigo MIDs today at Intel Shanghai. Here’s a set of 33 photos: » link to World Exclusive: Lenovo and Aigo Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) at Intel Shanghai – a photoset on Flickr 4 minutes ago from twitterrific

There are some nice size comparison shots with the Fujitsu U1010 and the Samsung Q1U.

Update: Josh posted a writeup on his blog about the gallery..

World Exclusive: I got to play with the Lenovo and Aigo Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) at Intel Shanghai

jabancroft Quick blog post on my MID photos, with some more details. Will post more of a writeup, and the videos, after sleep » link to World Exclusive: I got to play with the Lenovo and Aigo Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) at Intel Shanghai at Josh Bancroft’s TinyScreenfuls.com 5 minutes ago from twitterrific

To say the least, I was bummed out. I initially thought my drive was gone. I’ve already dropped U810 about 3-4 times and it always came back like a champ. I didn’t remember dropping it this last time but I could have jarred it by not gently setting it down on the table. Thoughts of replacing it with a $500-600 32GB SSD drive crossed my mind so I can prevent things like this happening since I am always mobile with this device and could use the extra durability.

So I pull out my thumb drive which contains Bart PE which I installed a while back in case something like this happens to any of my computers. As long as you can boot from the USB port, you can run this slimmed down version of Windows for diagnostics, testing, and recovery purposes. I basically wanted to check if my C:\ drive was intact so I could go on to the next step. Bart PE is great in that you can also get a network connection and backup the contents of your drive if you computer doesn’t want to boot up.

It turns out my harddrive was fine. Within Bart PE, I could see the entire contents of my drive and ran chkdsk which showed everything looked ok.

Then I remember the last thing I did. I put the U810 into hibernate mode. Ok, this told me the master boot record (MBR) was screwed. I have a dual-boot set up of Windows XP and Ubuntu and have GRUB as the bootloader. So somehow hibernating screwed up the MBR and left me with an unbootable machine.

So I began searching around for a Windows XP install CD. I did not have one. The usual solution for fixing the MBR is running a boot disk or Windows XP install CD, going to the recovery console, and running  fixmbr in the command prompt.

I searched around and found that the Ultimate Boot CD contained some utilities to recover the MBR. I downloaded the ISO and burned a CD with the MacBook. After connecting an external CD drive to the U810, I booted the CD to see if I can fix this thing. To say the least, trying to find a utility that worked was frustrating. Some of the utilities ran a virtual machine and left you with a DOS prompt without telling you the name of the .exe file to run. I ran several boot managers from the CD and successfully booted into XP, but couldn’t figure out how to fix the MBR with the boot loaders. At least I could get XP going, but there’s no way I’m going to carry around an external drive just to get it to boot.

After about an hour, I found partition application that successfully restored the MBR and used the XP partition as the default boot partition.

The next thing I did was wipe out the Ubuntu partitions, install Partition Magic, and resize the XP partition to use the cleared up space. I didn’t use Ubuntu much anyway. If I ever need to screw around with distros, I’ll go back to using VMWare.

So… phew.. damn I’m glad I didn’t have to reinstall the OS or replace my drive. Bart PE and Ultimate Boot CD saved my ass and prevented me from considering trying out Vista again.

I ordered some accessories last week for the Fujitsu U810 from the Fujitsu store.

One of the items was the docking station.  I finally brought it in to work today and took some snapshots with the iPhone.

On the back are 3 USB ports, VGA, LAN, and power.  The right side includes an additional USB port to make it 4 total.

There’s not much to it.  The piece of metal in the back slides in to make it more portable.  It works fine and will make it much easier to set up at my second location.

Panasonic unveiled a rugged UMPC at CeBit.  Based on Intel’s Atom (Silverthorne), it has a 5.6″ touchscreen and is water, dust, and shock proof.

I’ll assume this is not cheap since it’s under the Toughbook line.  This should be aimed to field workers.

Panasonic Also has an Atom Powered UMPC! : Akihabara News .com

OLPC News posted a hands-on review of the Elonex ONE, UK’s first sub £100 laptop. It’s aimed to compete with the OLPC XO. The design is very similar to the XO in that the guts of the machine is behind the screen rather than below the keyboard.

Some interesting details:

• The motherboard is behind the screen like the OLPC
• Detachable membrane keyboard
• Mouse stick on the back for navigating in slate mode
• 22x15x3 cm
• 0.95 kg
• 7″ 800×480 LCD
• 300 Mhz LNX Code 8 (?) processor
• 1/2 GB Flash storage
• 128/256 MB RAM
• Debian based Linux OS

No love for UMPC inkers
I am writing on my old trusty Samsung Q1.
A year ago most tableteers wouldn’t even
consider this as a viable inking device.
I’ve gotten used to it and I hardly have
any vectoring issues with it even with
my palm resting on the screen. Now
I have the Fujitsu U810, which in my
case, has even a softer touchscreen. In
a nutshell, inking on the U810 is plain
horrible.
Looking down the line of future
UMPC’s such as the HP 2133, which
I consider a subnotebook, and other
Asus Eee PC clones, it appears there’s
a slim to none chance we will see a
viable UMPC inking device. Even MID’s
will pass and try to go with finger
touch interfaces to compete with the
iPhone/iPod touch.
So what’s left for people like me?
Hope OQO continues with including an
active digitizer? Hope future Nokia
Internet Tablets will still have a
touchscreen and include a stylus?
Oh well… I’ve all but given up on
seeing a UMPC with a 7″ screen
that has a dual-mode active/passive
digitizer.

She has experienced the common difficulties of the initial set up but dives deeper into the WiFi issues than other reviews.

Pluses so far go to the screen, webcam, touchpad, and, of course, portability.

Via ultramobilelife.com

Anyway, now you can easily snap a photo of yourself everyday straight to the browser using a webcam with Daily Mugshot.

I’m not sure if I will keep up with this but since I have the Fujitsu U810 with me all the time with its built-in webcam, why not.  Maybe this will be a good incentive to live a healthier lifestyle and not look so much like a chipmunk.

Keeping current with Web 2.0 goodness, they offer an embed code to stream your mug to your favorite social network.

Via lifestreamblog.com

CarPC’s have been a hot topic here lately.  Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine just put up a short video on his UMPC moblog site showing how you can have a 15 hr CarPC/desktop PC using the Everun, Car dock, Samsung Q1 USB keyboard, and a Tekkeon MP3400 external battery.  Well, I have 2/4 items..  Looks to be a nice solution if you want to mount the Everun on to the windshield or a flat surfaced dash.

Here’s my mounting solution for the Fujitsu U810 using a ProClip vehicle mount and a RAM Mount cradle. 

Chippy’s UMPC miniblog.: Portable 15-hour car/desktop PC

I found out Inkseine was available a day early from Rob of gottabemobile.com so I went ahead and installed it.  So far it seems cool.  It works perfectly fine on the Fujitsu U810′s touchscreen.  I like the interface, but I’m not exactly sure what I’d use it for.  I’d still rather use Windows Journal for ink blog posts.  It’s fun to use so I suggest you try it out.

I noticed the UMPC Portal forums, rexibaby posted a link to a comment in an Amazon review showing the solution to the response issues.

Chris Heitmann says:

In reply to #8:
After using the u810 for a day – I also became frustrated with the unresponsiveness of the Touch Screen after not using it for 10 seconds or so. It was so frustrating to me that I was beginning to consider a return. Fortunately I finally found the solution so I thought I’d share.
HERE’S THE FIX! (Instructions are for Vista Home Premium – might be different on XP)
Open up “Device Manager” in Control Panel.
Expand “Human Interface Devices”
Double Click “FCL USB Pen Tablet”
Choose the “Power Management” tab
uncheck “allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”
That’s it. Real responsiveness! This really makes a HUGE difference in usability. Even if you have gotten used to the way it works or you’ve never had another tablet so you feel it’s performing ok – try this.

I tried it out and it works.  The touchscreen is much more responsive now.  Happy inking!

Here’s a quick video of the install. While I was setting up for this video, FedEx came again and dropped off the GorillaPod for SLR sized cameras. I stuck the Aiptek A-HD to it right away and used it in part of the video.
That’s why there’s so much noise. The GorillaPod is stiff, which is good, but it cause a lot of noise while bending the joints.

Mobile post sent by Rodfather using Utterz.  Replies. ]]> http://rodfathermobile.com/2008/02/13/just-got-a-ram-mount-fujitsu-u810-car-cradle/feed/ 5 http://rodfathermobile.com/2008/02/12/whats-coming-fujitsu-u810-car-cradle/ http://rodfathermobile.com/2008/02/12/whats-coming-fujitsu-u810-car-cradle/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:58:13 +0000 rodfather http://rodfathermobile.com/2008/02/12/whats-coming-fujitsu-u810-car-cradle/

Ok give up? Don’t care?

Here’s what is coming:

RAM Mount Cradle for the Fujitsu U810

CES ’08 Photo by pocketables.net

—–

I still have the ProClip mount I bought for my Subaru.  Right now, the Samsung Q1 RAM Mount cradle is attached to it.  I did a video of my CarPC setup with the Samsung Q1 a long time ago.  It will basically be the same setup but with this mount attached.

I’m pretty excited.  The Fujitsu U810 doesn’t quite fit snug in the dash compartment of my car, so I really needed a mount.  This will definitely make it easier for using the U810 for GPS navigation, music, and lifestreaming/vlogging with the internal cam or Xbox Live Vision cam I attached to the dash.

Best of all?  It’s only $15.95.  (plus $29.99 for the ProClip vehicle mount).

—-

Click To Play

Sat at the bowling alley with U810 and edited with Sony Vegas. Rendered to 320×240 512kb/s WMV.

Download WMV
Download MPEG4

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Download WMV file

Download MPEG4 (.m4v) file