For my very first interview on Ultra Mobile Life I had a little Q & A with Steve "Chippy" Paine who runs UMPCPortal.com and just completed his incredible Solar UMPC Tour. Here goes:
Bjorn: Now that you've finished your solar UMPC tour, I'd like to ask you a few questions for our readers to help them understand more about your trip and how UMPCs are changing the way we think about computing.
Steve: Thanks for contacting me about the Solar UMPC tour. Its been a long time in planning and those ten days just flew by. It was a great experiment and I learned a lot. I hope others learn something and enjoyed the trip!
I just updated my gallery software to include LightBox and it's a lot better looking. Take a gander at some of the Packard Bell photos and let me know if you like this better than the old style of gallery. For a quick preview of LightBox, click on the image above!
Jenneth Orantia over at Gear Diary, just proclaimed that "UMPCs are great" after an exotic dinner out with her new boyfriend Artie. What does a romantic evening with Artie have to do with UMPCs? Well, Artie is actually the name Jenneth gave to her new UMPC. It looks like she's had her UMPC for a few days now and is really appreciating the new ways she can be mobile:
That is, unless you’re using it while you’re eating at a Thai restaurant, which I did last night. I was playing Scrabulous (again - I’m seriously addicted, just ask Judie or Mitchell!) and surfing the Web while I was waiting for my meal. When my Pad Thai come, I simply propped Artie up on his stand (brilliant!) and kept reading an article while I was eating.
I have to say, the pad thai looks really delicious and I'll admit that I've been spotted at the Vietnamese near my house browsing on my OQO model 02. After a few days with a UMPC, most people end up toting it everywhere, and remembering where the best wifi hotspots are. I've found a few in Taipei and whenever I am near there, my OQO model 02 always tries to automatically connect me. In fact, on Saturday afternoon at yam.com's BlogLive launch party the wireless network was down and my OQO automatically connected me to the wireless signal from a restaurant nearby that I had been to before! So convenient!
In June, the VIA Technology Forum was held here in Taipei, Taiwan. There were a lot of interesting UMPC news coming out of that event, notably the VIA NanoBook Reference Design launch and the Mobile-ITX launch. I covered that a bit on this blog, but I wasn't able to share any of the video from that event. VIA has just released this little highlights real of VTF 2007 to recap the more important parts of the event. There's some good bits about UMPCs in there, have a look.
I just got some pictures taken at IFA 2007 sent in from a friend in Germany. He spotted the EasyNote XS at the Packard Bell booth and snapped a few photos. He also grabbed a couple of their flyers and scanned them in for me. I stuck the whole lot of them into a brand new gallery set up just for IFA 2007.
After the jump, the flyers and an exclusive scan of the Packard Bell EasyNote XS print advertisement. As you can see on the flyers, there will be two different models, the XS10 and XS20 with 512MB and 1GB of RAM respectively. Also from the IFA Virtual Marketplace, the EasyNote XS will go on sale for under 600€, nice!
