UMPC - What to pick / wait for?

I’m currently in the market for getting an ultra mobile PC. The brands I have been looking at are Aser (Eee PC), MSI (Wind PC), and HP (Mini-Note). I guess it’s a balance between mobility (size/weight) vs usability (Keyboard, ect). One thing I am pretty interested in looking into is a UMPC that uses traditional HD’s over Flash.

Does anyone here own a UMPC, or know what to look for? Anyone happy or unhappy about their UMPC purchase?

 

The Eee PC is very good, though I haven't got my hands on any of the other yet. I don't find the keyboard too bad, though I wouldn't want to write a book with it. The screen is decent for quick web browsing, probably one of the best ways to use an ultraportable. Proper laptops are too big and phones to fiddly.

It's the Linux friendliness and hackability that interests me the most.

 

It all depends on what you plan to use it for. The Eee PC has a lot of little mods that you can do to it in order to add extra functionality, but it has very little horsepower to do more than light surfing, taking notes, etc.

 

It ran AutoCAD 2007 and Flash/Dreamweaver CS3 pretty well. Play's Trackmania nations well too!

and that was on stock drivers with a 2gb ram module


for 300 bucks, what do you expect.....the fact it can handle most of today's needs is still simply amazing

 

the EEE PC 901 comes out in september. less than 600 dollars and it's got a 1.6 GHz CPU, and it's only a hair or so bigger than the original...picking that baby up

 

When will they make Laptop Devkits? For the vacation-going-yet-hard-working Developer!

 

I thought the point was the size. Hence the ULTRA MOBILE part of category name...

 

that does it. he's taking your quote out of his sig. :110:

 

Well even at the higher price point, as a UMPC it's still way cheaper than say a Lenovo X300 which is like $3000 dollars :/

I know the Asus Eee PC 700 series is pretty small (Seen one in person), but how about the 900/901/1000? Are they much bigger or heavier? How about battery life? I know Asus doesn't do the best at being upfront about battery times.

 

MSI has the Wind series of notebooks coming out soon. They have 10" screens, normal 80 gig drives and run xp/linux....apparently at under 400 bucks. Seems quite good really.

Acer has one coming out too which they claim will best the Eee easily in terms of price.

On the note of the Eee's price. the 900 series and above drew the line in terms of acceptable. unless maybe i'm horribly wrong, but the 900 series and above don't really warrant their price. 600 bucks for a 10 inch screen and 16 gigs of (flash) hdd? Sure the CPU is atom powered, though at 600 bucks you can pick up a quite decent full sized laptop....


for me though, you still cant beat the original Eee 701, cheap, well rounded mobile computing!

 

UMPCs are both expensive, underpowered and unreliable, and will continue to be like that until intel releases the Atom.

Of course, I'm talking about the all-in-one types like the UX VAIO and such.

$200 for you Kev, the rest of us had to pay $400 bones for this lappy.

Funny, had Apple released a laptop like the EEE, even at $500 it would've sold like booze during the mardi gras.

Instead they released the Air, the thinnest way to throw your money away:lol:

 

I'm waiting to see how the Acer Aspire One and MSI Wind both turn out. The Aspire One is supposed to return to the ~$300 mark with an 8.9" screen and an atom processor.

If I had the money to spend on an HP Mini-note, I would still wait. The Via C7M processor is supposed to be godawful, in that you can basically run one to two programs at a time before serious slowdown.

The Eee 901's look very promising, but I wouldn't want to spend that much money on a netbook. I love my Eee 701 (and am in fact writing this post on it), and much of the reason for that is the price. I would still like a "real" laptop if I'm going to be spending $500+ for a computer.

Personally, I would like something with a bigger screen and a larger flash hard drive. The 7" screen on the Eee is quite usable, but it gets to be annoying after awhile. I'm also waiting for something in this price range that carries an Atom processer. 1.6Ghz Atom, 20GB SSD, and an 8.9" screen would be great for me. Something like a Radeon 200M wouldn't be bad, either.

Wait until the MSI Wind and Acer Aspire One come out, as they look like two very worthy competitors.

 

I'm told that the Asus Eee PC 1000h has already been released in Taiwan. It looks like an offering to rival the MSI Wind, but it's taken a bit of time to come out.

Does anyone know if a standard notebook HD can be added to any Asus models bellow 1000h, without any serious moddifications?

 

I would wait until HP releases a version of the Mini Note with the new VIA processor in it. Faster than the Atom, and the HP has an excellent screen, keyboard and can even house a 2.5" HDD and ExpressCard for 3G modem.

 

In Japan anyway, another contender are the Kohjinsha PCs. They are very similar to the eeePC, but with touch-screen functionality, and other cool things. I bought one about 3 weeks ago, and I'm very happy with it due to its usefulness, size, and battery life, even if the CPU speed is a bit slow. It has a 40GB internal HDD, so the storage space is not bad either.

Here's the model I have: http://www.kohjinsha.com.sg/products/sa5sx04bs.htm

Kohjinsha has some other, newer PCs of a similar size, but more powerful & with DVD super-multi drive. They use Vista, however... :-(

 

Problem is they are quiet abit more expensive from what i saw in hong kong.

 

For that matter, does anyone know if these PC's can run something like Ubuntu? Windows Vista doesn't really rub me the right way :/

 

My Eee PC has Ubuntu on it right now. I don't know how support is for the other UMPCs/netbooks.