This one is too cool to pass up. A Scottish research team has come up with a way to give an audio and tactile indication as to how many messages are in your inbox and how full your battery is. Shake your phone, if it seems like there is a little ball bouncing around inside of it you've got a message. Have 2 messages? Two balls will bounce around inside. Checking your battery life will result in a sensation similar to water being inside your device. When your battery is full, it will make a sloshing sound like your device is full of water, when it's near empty it will seem like there's just a little sip left. We all know the OQO model 02 has an accelerometer, I think it's just a matter of time before we get start shaking our UMPCs to find out how much battery power we have left.

Check out the Shoogle site for more information.

In case you missed it this week, Dynamism announced that they would begin carrying the Wibrain B1 for only $699. They've put together this video of a guy playing Quake II on the B1 and I was blown away at how well he could play an FPS with a touchpad. I mean, seriously, that's some excellent hand eye coordination right there. I don't think I could do half as well as he did under the same circumstances. One of the main points of the video is just how intuitive the keyboard layout is. The mouse buttons, they keys, everything feels like it's right where it belongs. If distribution goes well, the Wibrain B1 looks like it will be the hottest UMPC this holiday season. 5" screen, 1024x600, 1.2 GHz VIA C7-M, 512MB of RAM for $699, that's hot!

CTitanic has gotten his hands on another VIA based UMPC. This time it's the Avox from Ruvo sporting a VIA C7-M 1.2GHz CPU, 768MB of RAM and a 6.5" touchscreen that slides up to reveal a keyboard. This is another review from CTitanic that has surprised me, he says it's "the first VIA processor tested by me that runs with a very low temperature and silently" and that he got "very good performance on XP" although he did knock the AVOX's keyboard, which I'm not surpised about since the last UMPC he handled, the OQO model 02, has possibly the best keyboard designed for a handheld. I'm looking forward to seeing what more he has to say about this UMPC.