Saturday, April 01, 2006

The UMPC of My (Current) Dreams

While I sit and dream about the day when I will have my very own Ultra-Mobile PC, I might as well take a page from Tracy Hooten (Tablet PC MVP and webmaster of The Student TabletPC) and blog about what I'd like to have in my ideal UMPC. I'm not promising to be entirely reasonable.

First, let's look at cost. The spirit is oh-so willing, but the cash is considerably weak (and I think Layne Heiny agrees with me). That a device a fraction of the size of a full-sized Tablet PC has less processing power than a Tablet, has no better battery life, and yet costs almost as much or more makes it even more difficult to save up for one. I'm not saying I'd not rather pay less, but I could see my way to finding $700 bucks (including shipping and taxes). That's $700, not $900, not $1400. I'm not unsympathetic to vendors' needs to recoup manufacturing cost and turn a profit, I'm just saying this is what I can fork out...in a little while.

Now, to the device, itself.
Processor: faster than my Tablet's 1 GHz (The Samsung Q1 has a 900 MHz Celeron processor; TabletKiosk's eos are 1 GHz.
Chipset: I sort of vowed never to use VIA chipsets again after the 4-in-1 issue with that wonderful game, Galactic Battlegrounds. I don't expect to try GB on my UMPC, but I want a non-VIA chipset, nevertheless.
Memory: I think a gigabyte sounds nice. I don't own any machines with that much...yet.
Display/Graphics: brighter than my TPC's, XGA, 64mb shared memory
Battery life: how about 4.5 hours?
Storage: 60 gb
I/O Ports: CF, USB, VGA, RJ45, phone out, audio in
Communications: IR, 802.11 b/g, 10/100 Ethernet
Size and weight: much less than my Tablet

I'm sure I'll think of something else later, but this will do for starters.

1 comment:

Varis said...

Why do you need a smaller device so badly you are willing to compromise processing power and user interface?