Okay, so this is really just a placeholder to prevent a dead link that used to occur when somebody like you pressed on “general thoughts” just up there. 

But since I’m here I may as well make mention of those UMPC’s that seem to have come and gone even before they have come out!  I think UMPC stands for Ultra Mobile PC for those who don’t know.

(I should mention that I don’t plan on turning this into a technology blog but I just read something about these things a moment ago and since I’m here now trying to think of something to write, well…)

I’ve never been quite sure just how many varieties and sizes of computers we actually need, and what we actually need them to do?  Funny thing is, that don’t think it’s just me who’s wondering that.  I think actually nobody really know what they want to do with one of these things.  I know you can probably come up with a list of things you think you might use it for, I can to.  You see I came up with a similar list when I bought my first PDA, and I used it for a couple of those things at least once… maybe twice.  That was a long time ago now, these days I have a PDA phone which I must admit it’s very useful and I use many of its functions quite often.  Let’s see, I guess I use for:

1. A phone
2. I scribble messages down on it
3. Take the occasional photograph 
4. A calculator
5. Calendar
6. Address book
7. I play a couple of games on it.
8. Read PDF files
9. Show my Demoreel off
10. Keep files; and,
11. Occasionally, when I am very desperate I browse the internet on it.

That’s probably not a bad list, but that has taken me several years of training to remember to use those functions and still I have to remind myself to use it when I normally might find the back of an envelope to write on instead.

So where would a UMPC fit in? 

I have a laptop as well, nothing unusual, a bit big and heavy admittedly but I can carry it around.  I like it because I can use it like a normal PC, keyboard and screen, easy-to-use, easy to see.  However, I do think twice about taking somewhere because of its weight. 

So a UMPC would fit in my bag, I wouldn’t notice its weight I guess.  It can run all the applications I’m use to.  But, can I work on it like a laptop?  Probably not. Why?  Because I can’t type on it, it probably won’t recognise my speech, and I will probably find the screen too small. 

Can I watch a movie on it, probably.  But that’s not too important to me.  I simply don’t want to watch movies if I happen to be sitting in a park somewhere and at the moment I don’t have to travel very far on public transport.  What else is it good for?  Music?  No.  Data storage, maybe but my 1 GB CompactFlash card is much smaller.  Wireless Internet, now there maybe a use for it there, so do I have to signup for some sort of wireless account, will it work here?  hmmm… what would be useful, is to have internet in my car!  Maybe it’s good for that.  I’ll think about that, but in the meantime…

It seems that it has fallen into a funny position; too small to be useful like a laptop, too big to be pocket sized. 

So what is the solution?  The people who are working on these sorts of things really have to figure out a better way to communicate with such a device.  Keyboards are simply too big, that’s the problem!  And you can’t make them smaller because then our fingers are too big!  Only once a solution has been found to that problem (the keyboard problem not the fingers one!) will such a device be any more useful than a large PDA.  A large PDA by the way, is not much more useful than a small PDA, except a small PDA fits in your pocket!  I hope you see my point. 

Okay, thinking about the some more , I know handwriting recognition is getting better all the time, so maybe I should get use to handwriting things again, as I guess that’s how you supposed to communicate with a UMPC. But, I’ve only just got used to typing and even so, I can probably type faster than I write.  So, I’m not sure if that’s the right answer, who knows maybe it is?

A few years ago I would have been going on about screen size as well, but I get the feeling that rollup screens are not too far away.

I hope you enjoyed my little rant, that feels like enough for a first go.  Feel free to make a comment, any comment, it would be the first!

Cheerio, Miles 

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 5:07 pm and is filed under My thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.