UMPCs

It's come to my attention that I haven't really written about technology too much on these pages, so I reckon it's time to have some tech articles along with my other ones! Anyway, on with the show...

UMPC stands for Ultra Mobile Personal Computer. The rather colourful and enticing name brings to mind images of computers sewn into coats and suchlike. Surprisingly, the answer isn't too far off - the UMPC is slightly larger than a PDA, but potentially retains the functionality of a full-fat PC. Notice the word 'potentially'.

The UMPC is, to all intents and purposes, a complete and fairly powerful PC. Obviously it's not going to contain an FX-62 and an NVidia 7900GTX, but it's still a good spec for the size. I'll put it like this - the spec is what you would expect in a decent business laptop, which is good and highly commendable.

The problems arrive when you examine the form factor and, on some models, the price. The form factor is small (obviously), usually with a 7" screen at 800 x 600 res. Some (Avertec's AHI UMPC (pictured left)- clicky) have a 1280 x 1024 res display, which is pretty damn good considering the size of the screen (5" in the AHI's case!). The screen takes up most of the surface area on the device, not leaving much, if any, room for a keyboard.

This means a lot of the UMPCs I've seen have sacrificed the keyboard, which I feel is a very bad move - the lack of a keyboard is what killed off the market for PDAs - the device was aimed at business users, who would want it to enter data into address books and compose letters on the move, but without a serious text-based input device, the PDA was slightly useless. Sure you could write on the screen and the handwriting software would turn that into text, but we all know how well that worked!

The UMPCs have plumped for a similar system, using both stylus input and a program called DialKeys (pictured on the Fujitsu P1510D, left) which is displayed like an onscreen keyboard. This looks promising, especially as it can be used when your holding the device by using your thumbs, but it still doesn't beat a full sized QWERTY keyboard.

As you can see, the Avertec AHI and the Sony Vaio UX50 (pictured above, right) are some UMPCs which do, wisely, include a keyboard for those times when you're sitting down and trying to hammer out an entire letter. The quality of the keyboards still isn't great and the positioning of the screen is also not very desirable (think of how laptops do it), but it's definitely better than nothing!

The devices have integrated graphics - as putting a graphics card in that space is a pipe-dream - meaning that serious gaming is out for the minute. However, old classics like Doom and Counter Strike should be able to run at a pinch and with the integrated wireless, deathmatches on the train are looking pretty good! You don't need cutting edge graphics to have fun, especially if it's a multiplayer match, where having friends to battle is part of the excitement, so the UMPCs can all fulfil that role fairly well at the minute, but undoubtedly someone will pack a decent laptop graphics card into it in the future, meaning that true gaming on the go may be possible with these intriguing devices.

What I would really like to see in the UMPC design, is a decent TV Tuner, with a good aerial built into the chassis - this would really boost the appeal of the system, giving it a unique selling point, putting it above PDAs and portable games consoles such as the PSP.

The prospect of a full XP computer in your hands is certainly a lovely thought and the execution of it seems to be going in the right direction, with devices like the AHI looking better and better, but the current crop are just a bit too high in price with a fairly sparse feature set. Better hold off on buying one right away.

David