UMPC Or The Ultra Mobile PC

Recently came across this again with quite a force. While working with the deal site work I have been seeing the reference to ultra mobile machines quite often, though of a particular model from Asus. But that did clearly indicate this category of notebooks is actually growing.

Then came across this blog dedicated to UMPCs. I was a little surprised at the variety of models that are getting quite a bit popular. Though I missed the opportunity for writing about them, the idea keeps swirling in my mind that I should go ahead and start writing about them. This may become of the niches I am looking for eventually.

VIA technologies' C7 chip seems to be getting quite poplar as x86 compatible processor of choice for such devices. May be I should start with an article on this little chip first!

Portable Audio Player Hall Of Fame

CNET featured some 9 portable audio/MP3 players recently. I was looking at the photos published in the slide-show referred to in that article. All the 9 shown below in one collage here.


Interesting how when new devices come into the market all kinds of features are tried out. Then as the products mature the features mature too. Almost all of these 9 devices have similar features. Originally they were just MP3 players but now they are turning into more of media players. Video playing becoming a big requirement. FM radio has become standard as has photo viewing feature. Most of them thus have a LCD screen that can show the video reasonably comfortably.

Back in 1983 while traveling to US for the first time I had a stopover at Tokyo Narita airport and had stayed at the Nikki Narita hotel, courtesy Japan Airlines. As I was window shopping I was amazed by the really small color TV model that had remarkable images. Almost like high quality photograph. Obviously on small screen the usual TV image blemishes were not noticeable. That possibly was a small CRT, these are LCDs, video viewing ought to be very comfortable on these devices!!

Top MP3 Players

CNET lists top MP3 players here. According to them the following are the top ones.

• Microsoft Zune
• iPod Touch
• Creative ZenV Plus
• iRiver Clix
• Cowon iAudio 7
• Samsung YP-T9
• Sandisk Sansa Clip
• Archos 605WiFi

Common traits are of course great sound quality, nice designs and friendly interface of course. Then we keep getting more and more storage and more and more play time per charge. As screen size keeps growing video play also is getting sophisticated. Photo viewing has been part of these devices almost from the start and did you notice how voice recorder and FM radio features too joined the feature crowding on these devices! It's almost like all the entertainment stuff you need, you have them in the palm of your hand wherever you go!

Contrary Views

I did a review of a product recently. I liked the product and said so in the review. The product is good. It helps you manage physical as well as computer files in a really very efficient way. You should be able to find the piece of paper you wanted, very easily. That usually is the problem we all face everyday.

While thinking about it, I realized , a contrary view also is possible. One of the ways things are changing is a trend to have everything in the computer including information that is on paper today. The thinking is to get these scanned and manage every bit of document via the computer. If that approach is valid, then the view held by the product that we may be dealing with a mix of electronic and physical documents cannot be a very valid approach. It may actually be following the scanning approach.

Which is the right view! I guess, if we are worrying about now then the approach taken by the product under review is valid but soon enough it may be the next approach which ought to be taken. The basic issue really is where exactly we are. Are we into that all electronic future yet! Only time will tell, I guess!!!

Working From Home

Never thought I'll actually do this, though have been watching the trend and been excited about it. Doing projects from is eminently viable. As I see the practice building up, I can generate enough money to survive well and pay for my home mortgage, it feels good! The flexible hours, being there with the family, particularly my little granddaughter is a true bonus! Let's see how this plays out.

Play with Playstations, Create a Supercomputer

Sony, IBM and Toshiba developed the Cel chip jointly and Sony went on to use them on the Playstation PS3. With a co-ordinating processor and eight execution units in each chip, the are actually well suited to churn things up a lot. Sony needed to process highspeed processing of hi-resolution of graphics. While doing so fortunately they left it as a open platform.

Now comes news that Gaurav Khanna, Professor of Astorphysics at the University of Mass. at Dartmouth put together eight of these machines and milking it for supercomputer performance; all for an investment of $4000 and some testing time. That really is good news for people looking for performance at a reasonable price!!

1 Gb RAMs become mainstream

512 Mb memory chips has been the mainstream component in use so long. By October however, the next leap seems to have happened. 1 Gbit chips have taken over. The hardware manufacturers made the switch in anticipation of Vista OS becoming catching up fast on popularity. Vista is memory hungry and the switch seemed logical.

There has been strange happenings however in the PC scene. Most PC manufacturers started pre-loading their machines with Vista soon after the release. However, soon news started trickling in that enterprises were pressing manufacturers to be able to switch to XP. Norm now has become that, XP disks that can be installed without getting back to MS for license keys are being shipped with systems. Most new purchase in the enterprise segment reportedly were falling back on XP.

Kind of strange!!