Power Developer - Portable Efika Project

Microsoft's UMPC format has a little following going - how can manufacturers like Samsung, Pioneer and so on really refuse to make devices around this endearing 7" micro-PC format?

A company in China has decided to bring out a UMPC "clone" based around an Intel XScale (ARM core) processor at ~500MHz:

http://www.made-in-china.com/china-products/productviewrqZJdFDbSnWO/UMPC.html

It is the same form factor, it will fit in all the readily available cases for UMPC products, and it runs Linux. I think this is truly proof that the device format has potential as a non-x86 and sub-GHz product. Having Power Architecture enter itself into the fray could be good for the ecosystem.

However I don't think we could hope to be engineering unique, unpatented touch panel interfaces for these devices, and of course when you get home and sit at your desk, do you really want to be tapping it with your finger?

Therefore, there is this;

http://www.darfon.com.tw/2005_HTM/HID/Portable_G953.htm

And you can obviously get little mice too!

A stylus-controlled PDA with a bundled keyboard and mouse solution, a flip back metal stand would rock the mobile device world. I think the only major concern is power management - PowerPC processors (even the MPC5200B) run fairly high compared to the Intel/Marvell XScale and Freescale i.MX cores. However the extra performance may be worth it. They are after all competing against 1.0GHz Via Edens, Pentium M ULVs, and graphics chipsets capable of accelerating Windows Vista.. it may not even matter!

And of course, does everyone remember the 3Com Audrey?

It ran QNX on a 200MHz x86 processor (Geode GX), had 32MB RAM, and did everything you could ever want, but of course.. this was back in the day when this kind of device was a little too new and fancy for most people (also in the days before people had broadband in vast quantity, so it came with a modem port!) so it pretty much died. Oh well. It would be nice to resurrect the QNX-running portable network PC..