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Written by Bjorn Stromberg
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Tuesday, 06 November 2007 |
James Kendrick posted a whopper of an article up on JK on the Run claiming that slate-style UMPCs are dead. I heartily disagree with James, one only needs to look at the slate design wins that are out there to see that they still account for the majority of the UMPC design wins. James conveniently forgets the AMtek T770 as a solid second generation slate-style UMPC and even discounts the Samsung Q1 Ultra as not being a slate!
James writes:
The manufacturers of them listened to the clueless market and as the second generation UMPCs started to roll out it was apparent that the decision had been made that the slate form was not desirable any longer. Every new UMPC released has a keyboard of some sort, from those awful thumb boards of the Q1 Ultra to the "full" keyboards of the Fujitsu u810. It has been becoming clearer that the market wants keyboards and that's what they will get. There are no second generation UMPCs (and I am referring to new models and not just refreshes) that do not have integrated keyboards.
This is just wrong. It's not that James hates slate UMPCs, he just doesn't get what consumers want. Consumers want an interface that they are familiar with and they complain rather loudly when they are approached with something new. I thought James would have already gotten over this issue as the Tablet PC market hasn't gone mainstream and is adapting to consumer demands with convertible notebooks. Railing against UMPC manufacturers for their decisions isn't going to help get this form factor adopted any faster. What will work is listening to customer feedback and making fast turn-arounds on product design and this is where UMPC makers are really excelling.
UMPC's are a year and a half old now and we're already seeing huge improvements on usability from a hardware perspective. We're looking at lots of software enhancements for next year with mobile linux. We've also got a third generation of UMPCs hitting the market in 2008. Looking back at the launch of the UMPC form factor in 2006 we can see an industry that is moving very quickly, adapting to consumer demands, and showing us that they're committed to getting this platform just right. I don't think there's been a mobile technology that has evolved as quickly as the UMPC. The cell phone and the notebook took over a decade to get really portable and really powerful. In ten years people will look back at these first UMPCs the same way we look back at the brick phone and briefcase computer. I can't even imagine what a UMPC will look like then.
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Visitor
Tuesday, 06 November 2007
this photo.....
ASUS T83 still alive!!!???????
Visitor
Tuesday, 06 November 2007
Hi Bjorn, two questions. 1. Is the picture with your article a slate or a convertible? Looks like a convertible to me.javascript:ac_smilie(';)') 2. What's "second-gen" about the Amtek T770? Thanks!
Bjorn Stromberg
Wednesday, 07 November 2007
Yes, the ASUS T83 is still alive. It's in debugging right now and I'm expecting to see a lot more of it in Q1 2008.
The picture is the ASUS T83, a convertible UMPC.
The AMtek T770 is the second UMPC from AMtek, you'll want to compare it to the first generation the T700 (sold in the US as the TabletKiosk eo UMPC v7110). The T770 uses the newer VIA VX700 chipset which has a smaller footprint, lower power consumption, and better video performance while the T700 used the VIA VN896. The T700 has a 1.2 GHz VIA C7-M compared to the 1.0GHz in the T700. Also the T770's hardware interface is much improved over the T700 with more intuitive controls, more dedicated function buttons and better speakers. I believe the LCD panel was updated as well, but I have to double check on that one.
Visitor
Wednesday, 07 November 2007
Interesting that you chose a convertible as an illustration for an article where you are stating that slates are not dead :p
As for the T83; Let's hope that Asus has paid attention to all the beating other manufactureres have received for using a 7" screen with a meager native resolution of 800x480 instead of 1024x600 :grin
By the way one reason why I would not consider the Asus R2H.
Visitor
Wednesday, 07 November 2007
Interesting that you chose a convertible as an illustration for an article where you are stating that slates are not dead :p
As for the T83; Let's hope that Asus has paid attention to all the beating other manufactureres have received for using a 7" screen with a meager native resolution of 800x480 instead of 1024x600 :grin
By the way one reason why I would not consider the Asus R2H.
Visitor
Wednesday, 07 November 2007
Sorry for the double posting - the website did not seem to react to the send button ... :roll
Visitor
Thursday, 22 November 2007
slates will only attract a small percent of the market, mainly more tech people. The numbers already prove that as the highest estimates of UMPC's I've seen is 700k and yes thus far most UMPC are slates or slates with lame thumb input.
Now compare that form factor to the form factor of the clamshell handhelds of the 90's they sold close to 4 million units in the same approximate time and had even less marketing than UMPC's. The UMPC's need to add touch type keyboard pocket devices like the old Psion 5mx in order to attract mainstream sales. Otherwise they will continue to have weak sales.