Wibrain had a big booth at CeBIT this year, and it sounds like their UMPC is a big hit. In this video you'll see some of the B1's accessories including the car mount that includes GPS (brilliant idea!) and a docking station with built-in DVD-RW. Another interesting tidbit in the video is that the B1 UMPC will be available with both Windows XP and Linux. Remember, I wrote about the Wibrain B1L that was scheduled for a Korea only release. This video makes it sound like we just might be seeing a Wibrain B1 running Unbuntu outside of Korea afterall.

I just bumped into this video of Nicholas Negroponte from 1984, it's a presentation from TED where he talks about the future of computer technology. It's really quite amazing how well Mr. Negroponte predicted a lot of the products and technologies we're seeing on the market today. He was so accurate on some of these issues that one might be tempted to give him the nickname Nicholas "Nostradamus" Negroponte. Listen to him talking about touch interfaces and you'll hear him say, "There are certain things you can do with more than one finger input." which we all recognize today as the multi-touch on our iPhones and the most talked about feature that people expect Apple to put into a UMPC if they decide to enter the market.

Now, Mr. Negroponte has been instrumental in making sure that some of his predictions came true, but I don't think he had any idea that his visions would ultimately result in the UMPCs that we see today. In the video you can see him talking about a new kind of book, a CloudBook if you will, that is interactive and is an in-depth resource for whatever topic you want to read about. Of course many of you know about the OLPC program that Negroponte has been running, and this program has had a significant impact on UMPCs in shrinking the form factor, increasing the battery life, and driving prices down.

Have a look at the video. Doesn't Negroponte sound like he's talking about our beloved UMPC?

Mini PC Pro has just released this video shot at CeBIT of a comparison between the Noahpad UMPC and the EeePC bootup times. The Noahpad posts a very good boot up time of 33 seconds with its 1.8" disk-based hard drive compared to the 27 seconds of the flash-based eee PC. Both UMPCs were running Windows XP, and the timing was done from the initial Windows XP boot screen until the background showed on the screen. 30 seconds is a very respectable boot time, typical PC boot times clock in at over one minute. It would be interesting to see how the Noahpad performs with a SSSD as most solutions in speeds up boot times by 50%.

Youtube user naorion has uploaded two videos onto YouTube showing his CloudBook UMPC running Warcraft 3 and Quake 3. It looks like both games ran quite well on the CloudBook with a decent framerate. The native resolution on the CloudBook isn't perfect for these games, but with a little bit of stretching they are fine. Have a look at the videos and see for yourself, this little UMPC handles WC3 and Q3 with ease.

Quake 3 after the jump

Some of you may remember I Crayon Physics a while back. This is a new physics sandbox called Phun that let's you experiment with physics in a playful environment. You draw the environment, tweak the physical properties, and then watch the results in real time. Phun includes motors and liquids as well as hinges and friction controls. Just like Crayon Physics, this is a great application for pen and finger inputs. Download a beta of this and give it a run on your UMPC at let us know what you think.