Devices will be size of a handheld, have a hard drive, Wi-Fi and VGA display, vendor claims. A new type of mobile device that is barely larger than a standard handheld but runs Windows XP on an i86 processor was unveiled this week at the CES. Vendors said the device, which they are dubbing the ultra-personal computer (UPC), will be available in the second half of this year. Development of the device is being encouraged by Transmeta, which has a line of i86-compatible processors that is small enough and has sufficient heat dissipation to be put into devices without cooling fans.
Windows XP Handheld Due Later This Year
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I was at CES, saw every major presentation, and I never saw the “unveiling” of this device. Pure fiction is all this is.
Is “i86” the same as “x86” or there’s a difference? If not, why the different names? thanks.
Gein
Oh yes, it does exist:
http://www.oqo.com/hardware/basics/
Some the manufacturers never get it – unless you are have decent DX9 and SoundBlaster hardwares on them, these are just “bricks” to us users.
> unless you are have decent DX9 and SoundBlaster hardwares on them, these are just “bricks”
Depends if your target market is 18-year old gamers or businessmen.
I remember hearing about them a year or two ago. They looked interesting at the time but always seem to be “coming soon.” The antelope computer is another example along the same lines, though it is based on the idea of a modular design, which I think has more potential. http://www.antelopetech.com/en/Index.aspx
I ran out of patience waiting for them and just went with an ultra portable (Fujitsu P5010D). It is not as small as the OQO or Antelope but it was available.
Above comment was me (not that anyone cares).
I too had heard of this a while back – I was pretty sure it was vaporware
The problem with these types of devices it that they run an interface designed for a large high resolution monitor, a fullsize keyboard, and a mouse. It may sound neat to have xp in a handheld, but I will take ce or palm over it any day because they were designed with the physical restrictions of these devices in mind.
i think the problem with these devices is that they are too small to be useful and too big to be convenient to carry around. That leaves them solidly in nomans land and leads to a niche market.
I still prefer a small notebook.
The way I see it this thing just don’t have any market for it. If you want something really small that can boot desktop Windows XP then a small notebook would only be a lill bigger and pack far more power and far more options. If you want a handheld then get a REAL handheld and go with Pocket PC or Palm. Thoes are smaller, liter, and will do really all that it can do. Wut will be really kewl is make a Pocket PC with one of thoes super small harddrives they put in the Ipod these days. It would make the device a lill thicker.
–Idoxash
When I worked at some large computer company they made under contract an OEM product that at the time (486 processor) did most of this. The company failed but the idea lives on.
I would love to have something like for tech work. Why carry a laptop when a palm sized device would work?
The OQO was announced a couple years ago. They even took pre-orders and down payments, the low end unit being ~1500 (800 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB drive) or so, the higher-end was $1800 (1 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB drive) I believe. They were supposed to be out a month or two after the start of pre-orders.
6 months later, they refunded the pre-orders and evidentally went back to the drawing board. The new design is nicer- a better screen (I have a nice 5″ 800×480 on my WinCE Sigmarion 3, probably the same screen) and the keyboard. Though, the keyboard looks like the same style as is on the Zaurus C760. Better than nothing when in a pinch, but not that useful. If I ever get an OQO or any tiny Windows handheld, I’ll be using Phatware’s CalliGrapher for desktop windows, PenOffice. Very good HWR, even for my crapass handwriting.
Anyone know how much this iteration of the OQO is to cost? I heard from a mailling list I’m on that something in the ballpark of $3500, which is entirely outrageous. $1000? Oh, yes. $1500? For me, still yes. $2000? I’d have to think about that. $3000 or more? No way in hell. I’ve never spent that much money on computer, not even close. I’d rather have a 400 MHz Transmeta, 128 MB of RAM, 5 GB HD for $1000 than a $3500 monstrosity. Who the hell carries around a $3500 PDA? I am a very, very careful person with my PDAs and other electronics, but I would be afraid of it getting ripped off, sat on, smashed, kicked, sneezed on, dropped, anything. May as well get a desktop, cuz I don’t think I could take it out of the house witohut it being covered in bubblewrap and in a clear plastic bag.
IMHO, the OQO isn’t too big. I carry around a device that is bigger than it most of the time with no problem. Bigger than most people would carry around, but I have no problems. I would welcome the OQO, which is smaller. The device in question- a Sigmarion 3 WinCE-based palmtop/handheld PC- is thinner than the OQO, but has the same screen
The 800×480 screen with a 5″ diagnal- just about the perfect DPI for me. The 4″ 240×320 screens don’t show anywhere near as much as I’d like. On the other hand, you have the 4″ 640×480 screens in the Zaurus C7x0 line where a lot fits on the screen but the DPI is so high that you have to crank the font up to 24 to keep from hurting your eyes. I tried to use a Zaurus C760 as a computer, as a “personal mobile tool” as Sharp and many Zaurus users claim it to be, rather than just a scheduler and “PDA.” [1] It hurt my eyes to do so, with the DPI being so damned high. Web browsing for an hour or two without the Zaurus 6 inches from your face gave me a headache. And I’m the kind of person who likes a high res on monitors, not some senior citizen with their 17″ at 800×600 or even 1024×768.
[1] = though it is silly to say that the Zaurus isn’t a “PDA” because it does more than a PalmOS device. The device for which the term PDA was invented- the original Newton MessagePad- was a device with as much power and versitility as the Linux-based Zaurus series, waaaay beyond PalmOS back then and still today. Perhaps a new term should have been thought up for PalmOS to use instead of PDA- GEP? General Electronic Planner? A Palm’s primary function may be very short notes (as opposed to the notes I take on NewtonOS or WinCE), dates and todos, but the “General” denotes that you can do more than simply organize.
theorz: Luckily for you, you can run WinCE on it. WinCE runs on x86 CPUs, you get it free with the WinCE SDK that you can download from MSDN.microsoft.com. I used to run it on a PC of mine, only used it for web browsing, and it was an older machine with limited RAM. CE beat the hell out of 9x, NT/2k/XP and Linux as far as providing a responsive, easy to use, stable and feature-filled-enough environment. Since CEPC isn’t used as much as CE for ARM there are few apps for it, but there are some. And IE comes with it. You do have to be careful with making sure you have supported hardware. To get everything- the particular USB chipset, FireWire, all the docking stuff, etc etc on the OQO working under CE would probably take a bunch of driver writing, alas.
The market this device aims for is already covered by the PDA and a much more reasonable price.
The only gap in the existing market is small formfactor desktop PC’s. Currently shuttle is the only player here and all they sell are barebones kits that are not even available to the “consumer” market. I believe this is one market that is not yet saturated. If someone can manage to get a consumer ready “mini” pc down to around $250 – $300 I believe it would be popular.
I dunno … I just can’t see myself having a need for a device like this. If I actually needed something small to write phone numbers and addresses on while on the go, I’d spend about $.50 on a notepad and use that.
The one person I know who owns this had a bunch of crap on it and somehow wiped it all out before she got around to syncing it.
It is suppose to debut in 2002 when it was unveil in 2001 – guess what? It’s 2004, and I sincerely don’t believe that they would release it anytime soon… unless I see it for myself. Which isn’t the case.
Besides, how many would actually buy a OQO? Using anything lower than a 12″ screen is a pain with Windows XP (or any other desktop OS), what about an handheld device? Who actually would buy it? I much prefer to buy a ultra-portable than a OQO, personally.
They were just showing it on techtv . Pretty neat has long cable that can be attached to it which has many of the connections like video out , 1394, usb hub on it. They said that the price would be around $ 1900. It would neat though u can carry ur operating systems with u.all ur internet setings and favorites. as its x86 based it would be capable of running linux too.
First, yes it exists. It was on techtv today in someone’s hand as they demo’ed it. Second, now you have to wait 2 mins while your handheld boots up… Great.
Except XP takes about 30secs to boot, usually less.
Yes but on what hardware? 😛
i dont think thats exactly a 7200rpm harddrive and 3ghz pentium in there. oh and ram… hah
It takes 25-35 seconds on 1.1GHz Duron, 5,400RPM 80GB hard disk, with 512MB of PC133 SDRAM. The slowest part of the bootup is the when BIOS comes out first.
“Except XP takes about 30secs to boot, usually less.”
Well, my machine with XP takes about 1 minute to boot to the login screen. It is an AMD 2.4G with 512MB RAM. All depends on the services and if there is actually any software installed on the machine. I have seen 15 seconds before actually, but that machine had nothing but Windows XP on it with no services and not even office installed yet, so if you don’t actually do anything with the machine I can see it
and that is comparable to a 200mhz palm running an embedded palm OS or newer pda?
The OQO is impressive but not in that way. Perhaps they can work on an extended “sleep” mode that would make it much better for opening and closing all day.
The anonymous post was by me..forgot to put my name in on this comp
When you get a decent unix machine today?
Check out the slc750/760/860 from sharp. There even is a full blown linux distribution – see http://www.cacko.biz. Additionally, they have just ported gentoo over.
And this device is just the size of my old psion revo. fits into my pocket, about 200grams, sharp and crispy vga display, sd & cf port (add a microdrive!)…
Firstly, XP can be made to boot extremely fast by disabling unnecessary services, I’ve managed to make it boot in less than 20 seconds on a 1ghz Athlon with an ATA100 5400rpm hard drive, and it takes even less than that on my 2500+.. although adding startup programmes like AVs always slows it down.
I note from discussion about Apple’s new Ipod Mini that hardd rives are now available in 1-inch and 1.8-inch form factors. I would love to see handhelp PDA manufacturers substituting these for the CF (or similar) cards usually used for system memory
That would make for PDAs which have the capacity for all the users documents at one time instead of just selecting the 32mb of most important docs one wants to carry
(and a lot of Mp3s also!)
The design looks pretty good on this machine but I feel they’ve compressed the keyboard a little far. Possibly they could have made the keys deeper, like a Psion board.
Price kills this brick stone dead.
I note from discussion about Apple’s new Ipod Mini that hardd rives are now available in 1-inch and 1.8-inch form factors. I would love to see handhelp PDA manufacturers substituting these for the CF (or similar) cards usually used for system memory
I don’t know about Palm OS 6, but Palm OS 5, 4 and below aren’t all that good in keeping files. There is a group of certain types of files that can be saved, and managing it is very different from managing files on your PC. In other words, something with the capacity of a few GBs wouldn’t do much to Palms, unless a overhaul of Palm OS. Pocket PC doesn’t have this problem, but most of the world uses Palm OS.
Besides, most Palm-compatibles come with relatively low-capacity CF/SD/Memory Stick with the PDA, if any at all. And they are much cheaper than one of those microdrives. And the reason why MP3 players like iPod can use these drives is because of the shock-absorbing enclosure made of (I think) rubber within the chassis – in other words, it isn’t as simple as just snapping in a hard disk.
The design looks pretty good on this machine but I feel they’ve compressed the keyboard a little far. Possibly they could have made the keys deeper, like a Psion board.
Personally, I much prefer the one of the CLIÉ UX series. Can be flipped away when don’t want to be used, without or with hiding the screen. I never really liked Psion keyboards.
While someone claims the device was shown somewhere, the photos provided are all too clear, and with these crystal-white backgrounds and precise reflections/shadows — they are most likely look like a rendered model.
Talking about its future, I don’t think the device of this kind will be useful enough to pay 2K$ for it. If I need ‘damn small real PC’, I’ll consider to buy something like Toshiba L5 or Sony Vaio ultracompacts (don’t remember model # for Sony, sorry). At least they both have ‘natural’ keyboard.
…or even older Toshiba Libretto 110CT for ~500$ at ebay
Eugenia: Depends if your target market is 18-year old gamers or businessmen.
Read his original statement, “Some the manufacturers never get it – unless you are have decent DX9 and SoundBlaster hardwares on them, these are just “bricks” to us users.” Using my oh-so-not-good comprehension skills, he is saying for the market, the size is too bulky. He says the size of the OQO isn’t that bad if it was targeted towards gamers.
What I would really like a handheld with the power of a pentium 133, about 64mb ram, a keyboard I can type on, and a very readable 80×25 text only black and white LCD. Use CF disks for storage. 802.11b for networking.
The case should be stainless steel, and the thing should take a 30 metre drop test.
It should be possible to make this cheaply, with *very* low power consumption with todays tech, and it’s easily enough power for playing mp3s while writing documents, spreadsheets, email, and web browsing with lynx. (frotz should fill any gaming needs.
There is no way I’m going to be doing DTP, editing graphics or watching films while on the move, so I see no need for the power of the OQO box. Just give me cheap, very reliable, very low power, a readable display, useable keyboard and rugged!
Wasn’t Trasmeta somehow related to Linux (employed Linus back in the day)? Now, what’s the use of buying it if it only can run XP? Well, some people definitely don’t care, but OSNews crowd won’t go for that I’m sure.
A Pentium133 can just barely decode MP3s, and AFAIK it can only do so to MP3s with bitrates in the lower ranges. If you want to decode stuff like 192kb and up, you need more CPU power.
There is a much better form factor UPC in the works.
It’s a clam shell type also running wxp.
Look at -> http://minipc.vulcan.com/
Linus wasn’t hired for Linux, he was hired to write the software layer on Transmeta’s processors.
Well, my p133 is a little poorly right now, but I have top showing about 62% idle time playing back a MPEG 1.0 layer III, 192 kbit/s, 44100 Hz stereo on my p200. I reackon the p133 would do it.
Damm, we used to MAKE albums on those suckers. Kids these days…
These things are just fancy toys with limited use. I agree with the other posts about how a small laptop is a better solution.
Does exist, I saw Patrick from Screen Savers demo it at CES.
Windows is ready to rock on the Nokia Domain
There are no physical specs on that site Eugenia linked to. If this machine is about as big as a Psion 5 or a HP 200LX, it will be a winner.
BTW, there’s no way that they will use the explorer.exe shell for the device. That would be foolish. Most likely, they’ll build their own shell.
When will companies start creating technology that we need, as opposed to shit they think we need…