So – as most of you are aware. I am a bit og a technophile. I like my toys. I like running windows based devices as it gives me flexibility but I am not bound to windows. I have a pc, windows laptop and steph has a mac laptop. They work together well. I run a windows mobile phone (HTC all the way) and steph runs an iphone. They both have advantages. Apple does a good job of selling packages. Microsoft sells a software solution that might suit your hardware and might not.
With that in mind I recently decided to buy a tablet PC/ultra mobile portable computer (UMPC). I feel I would actually utilise it and won’t just be buying it as another toy. This has to be done before my mortgage repayments start also :)
There are several UMPC’s I invesitgated to purchase direct from China. Most aren’t running true multi-touch (dual etc) and some have incredibly poor battery life (2hrs). Some are cloned to look exactly like an ipad. Some look cooler.
Most seem to run Windows 7. This may be the cause for the poor battery life, but might not be. Either way Win7 is not ideal. Some run Google Android. While it’s a cool operating system, it has its bugs and most of the android devices had poorer hardware specs.
Even a french company has one available. Evo. There’s also the netbook navigator nav9 who ignore the crap battery life and just have it available and in stock.
Some of the bigger companies like HP even had prototypes on display at trade shows. The slate seemed to have the most potential for any windows UMPC (and yes it had flash – fuck you apple). Decent specs, up to 5 hrs battery life. It looked HOT and had usb ports, no forced apple connectors.
There are rumours it is now canned as they couldn’t get windows 7 to work properly on it and it chewed the battery life. Hp may or may not be dabbling with android as a suitable alternative to it – but they are not releasing any official details. They did however recently buy Palm and Palm’s WebOS. This will bring HP back into the mobile phone market and potentially give them a new OS for tablet UMPC devices. There’s an interesting article on that here http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/HPs-Palm-Acquisition-Could-Affect-Microsoft-Tablet-PCs-512585/
So… despite all that technology – no other company apart from apple seem to have it sorted. Yeah I know there are sites like UMPC portables, pocketables blah that list all the available devices – few of them are actually available or suitable (with regards to tech specs, battery life etc).
A taiwanese company called Innoversal has an impressive looking device with a screen that turns the backlight off during bright light to save on battery. It looks HOT but isn’t expected to be available till September, maybe.
To sum it up…. Flash or no flash, adobe air or no adobe air, apple has it sorted. Yeah the no adobe thing sucks as MOST websites use flash but HTML5 apps/js etc will fill the gaps. The iPad has awesome battery life, a decent screen, easy to use OS, good hardware and bucketloads of apps. I’ll have mine within a week or two.
