Saturday 12 January 2008

Asus EEE, Ultra Mobile PC

The Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC), is a specification for a small form factor tablet PC. It was developed as a joint development exercise by Microsoft, Intel, and Samsung, among others. Current UMPCs feature the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, or Linux operating system and low-voltage Intel Pentium or VIA C7-M processors in the 1 GHz range. The most popular UMPC is VAIO designed by SONY but in compare to other handheld gadgets such as PDAs and smart phones, UMPCs have not been so sucessful because of their short battery life, price and weight. Asus has promised to deliver a light and low price (just under 200£) UMPC in 2008. This is called EEE and is running Linux. Its weight is under one Kg; because it does not have any hard-disk and uses only flash memory (4GB). It will be a big step forward in designing ultra-light mobile PCs.

Tuesday 8 January 2008

Powerful chips on mobile phones

The good news is in the next few years , 5 years apparently, mobile phones will carry chips with the power of today's desktop PCs. This was announced by Intel.

What has motivated this idea is having a personal net and high-speed internet access on mobile phones. Since iPhone's appealing user interface and easy WiFi connection via all access-points the competition among mobile phone designers is hight to provide a more intuitive and less frustrating web service on handheld devices. In the other hand, having powerful chips means longer battery life and good support for graphics, which eventually improve other aspect of interface design on handheld devices.