Hugo announced on his blog that he will be carrying the full range of Samsung UMPCs. This is great news for Australians because now they can get their hands on the elusive Q1B with its massive battery life.

Personally, I think Hugo is actually three different people and they can never appear in public at the same time. I just can't figure out how Hugo has time to accomplish all the things that he does!

After considerable work at the office trying to track down some solid answers, I haven't come up with much. About the only thing I can say is that Engadget seems to be spreading this rumor and I have no idea where they got their information. HTC isn't releasing any information about which CPU they've chosen and as such, VIA is unable to talk about it at this time.

I'm really impressed with the device. It looks great and it seems like it includes a lot of features that people have been clamoring for. What really surprised me was the amount of attention the HTC Shift got for UMPCs. Take a look at Technorati's statistics for blogs that talk about UMPCs for the past 3 months. You'll see three events very clearly:

• CES
• CEBIT
• CTIA

What's interesting is the comparison of overall blog entries for each of the three trade shows:

CES and CEBIT are about the same size and CTIA is way smaller than both of them, but the amount of buzz generated for UMPCs at CTIA this year was bigger than either CES or CEBIT. Last year at CTIA no one was was talking about UMPCs, for CTIA to surpass CEBIT and CES this year as the tradeshow for UMPCs is really telling about where the UMPC industry is going.

Looking forward to the next big industry trade show, Computex, we can expect to see more ultra mobile devices with VIA putting powerful x86 processors into even smaller packages and getting much closer to that "all day" 8 hours of battery life.

Alright, I've been quiet too long today. From the moment I opened my browser this morning I've had this feeling like I got kicked in the stomach. HTC launched a VIA-based UMPC at CTIA and I was the last person to know about it. How can this be? I've been asking around the office here and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of this debacle. When I asked Eliane if she'd read about the Shift, she looked at me incredulously and said, "yeah, I already read about that." And I'm supposed to be the geek who knows everything about UMPCs here! I'm gonna have to pass my geek hat on to her if things keep up this way.

Meanwhile I've done some digging around here and I'm trying to get some confirmation one way or another about just what parts are in the HTC Shift. For now, all I have to go on are the specs that Engadget published from their sojourn at CTIA. Bear with me while we await confirmation from people with more authorization than me.

Mark over at ultranaut.com has an outstanding write up of his recent frolic with a UMPC. He brought his Samsung Q1 to a conference instead of his laptop and was delighted at how much smaller his bags were. He goes into what worked for him and what didn't work for him. Unsurprisingly, the things that he enjoyed doing with his UMPC vastly out-numbered those that he didn't. It looks like Mark had a great experience and I look forward to seeing him write more about his experiences with a UMPC.