For many years, computer companies have searched for the Holy Grail of computing: A full-fledged computer smaller than a laptop without a substantial loss in productivity. Imagine a computer than weighs less than two pounds and is capable of running all the programs you use now. Time and time again, engineers have tried to shrink laptops down to the size of a paperback book or create some sort of PalmPilot on steroids. However, all attempts up until now have been, for the most part, failures (with a few heavily hyped, crash-and-burn type flameouts).
The reason all these devices failed was because they required too many compromises: illegible screens, pained data entry, slow speed and/or short battery life, lack connectivity and high price. Lately though, new technologies like Wi-Fi, flash drives, faster processors, and better displays have surfaced that could banish or at least alleviate many of the issues that have plagued these super small PCs for years. Now, the prospect of a computer just barely bigger than a Sidekick is a very real and tangible possibility.
These Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPC's, you can thank Microsoft for that clever, klutzy moniker), as they are now called, come in different flavors.
Samsung makes the tablet touchscreen Q1. Sony makes the Vaio UX, which comes with a slide-up screen that reveals a small BlackBerry-style thumb board underneath. A start-up company called OQO makes a computer similar to the Sony, but even smaller, called the model 02. All of these devices have a footprint of around five to six inches by three to four inches and a thickness of around one to one and a half inches. For perspective, these things are the size of two bars of soap placed together. Somehow, inside this roughly one-pound package, they manage to squeeze a real computer that can run a full version of Windows Visa (!) on a screen that's around four or five inches large. You can surf the internet with built-in Wi-Fi, check Blitz (or regular e-mail if you are in the rest of the world), write papers (or not); basically you can do almost anything you would do on a regular computer. Did I mention that you could put a UMPC in your (bulging) pocket?
Speaking of bulging pockets, you will need one full of money to buy one of these babies. Prices start at around $2,000 for the Sony Vaio UX, $1,500 for the OQO and the Samsung Q1 starts at under $1,000 according to Froogle (which by the way, has been renamed Google Product Search, really lame). These prices can be deceptive because you will probably need to buy docking stations and external CD/DVD drives for these computers, so factor in some additional Franklins for that stuff.
In the end, this newest generation of UMPCs has not solved all the problems of its predecessors. Battery life is still two hours or less, the thumb board (if it has one) is still slower than a real keyboard, and most of all, Windows was just not made for such a small screen (small text looks like black specks). Unfortunately, the dream has not come true just yet.
