Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
> UMPCs: still a gimmick despite Intel's best efforts?
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | So, Intel CEO Paul Otellini's forecast of handheld devices capable of
> | running the full version of Windows Vista in 2008 looks set to come true
> | - what isn't yet clear is how long they'll be able to do so. Based on
> | what Intel said - or, rather, didn't say - the prognosis is not good.
> | UMPCs are not going to be replacing folks' laptops just yet.
> `----
>
> http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/04/20/ump_chances_analysis/
Vista is bad enough on *standard* Laptops, I dread to think what it does
to the batteries on UMPCs.
As for switching off Aero as a "solution", that's just lame. Apart from
anything else I doubt that will compensate for the *real* problem of
Vista being a fat bloated pig of an OS. It's funny how my Lappy's
battery life is virtually unaffected by Beryl being enabled - there's
maybe about 5 or 10 minutes difference, at most. AFAICT it's the moving
parts (hard drive, DVD drive) that seem to affect battery life most on
my Lappy, and we all know how much Windows thrashes hard drives, right?
As for UMPCs, I really don't see what all the fuss is about. Just seems
like a new acronym for old technology (TabletPC). I've been using a
Psion Netbook for years, which unlike these UMPaLUMPas also features a
built-in keyboard (and an excellent one at that). It also runs a
non-Microsoft OS (Symbian), which is another plus, but it can also run
Linux. In fact Windows is incapable of running on ARM processors at all
(other than that toy thing called WinCE).
If I bought a TabletPC, the first thing I'd *need* to get for it would
be a keyboard, which kinda defeats the point of buying a keyboard-less
PC in the first place, doesn't it? Sorry, but I simply could not live
without a keyboard.
If I was in the market for another ultra-portable, I'd go for a
sub-notebook rather than these silly UMPaLUMPa things. In fact, I'd
probably buy a second-hand, 12 inch, Mac PowerBook Pro and stick Linux
on it. Actually, if the OLPC XO was available to consumers, I'd probably
buy *that* instead. You can't go wrong for 75 quid, can you?
I'm waiting for the Apple WWDC2007 in June, to see if they release a 12
inch MacBook, which is long overdue. They're hugely expensive, but the
build quality is exemplary, they have the "cool" factor, and I'd also
get to play around with Mac OS X, which has my curiosity piqued.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| I found [Vista] to be a dangerously unstable operating system,
| which has caused me to lose data ... unfortunately this product
| is unfit for any user. - [H]ardOCP, <http://tinyurl.com/3bpfs2>
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Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.20-1.2312.fc5
16:33:17 up 4 days, 14:05, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.13, 0.27
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