Sunday 30 September 2007

UMPC’s - The quest for the ‘ultimate’ in mobility…

Well first things first - I sold my Acer Tablet C204TMi on Ebay for a rather paltry £570 and i’m now on the market for a UMPC - bit of a shame that I bought the unit for over £1200!
So why did I sell the unit? Or to put it more precisely - why did the device fail me so heavily?


As I began to use the device over the period of leaving Coventry University and settling in to ‘work life’ I probably bought the device a little to late as it would have been great for taking notes in lectures. The primary features I required at the time were that it was powerful enough to carry out fairly demanding tasks such as big applications; play some games (To try and tie off the wound of losing a Geforce 6800 based AMD gaming platform used to fund my resistive digitizer adventure), and of course that ‘wow’ factor of being able to tap on the screen.
All in all, the device was to heavy as a truly ‘mobile’ device, and it’s battery life to short to do anything remotely useful with it. One of the results of this was that the chaps at work didn’t wish to use my device as the weapon of choice for a wireless site survey and chose a (lovely!) IBM 12″ TFT tablet PC instead.


It also became apparent that I didn’t play games really anymore - indicated by the fact that i’m lending my Xbox 360 to a friend as mine had remained unplugged for quite a while. The tablet PC also therefore suffered the same fate and sat collecting dust in a cupboard in my house.
So if i’ve just sold this device then why am I considering a UMPC? I did some serious thinking about what I deem as ‘useful’ mobile technology and what it can do for me, rather than buying a device that can try and cover all bases and generally do it badly!


Come on Ebay! Find me a bargain!

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