My first umpc
Until now I have been working with an ipaq hx4705 when away from my desk. I’ve loved it, but it has had it’s limitations. It’s ok for GPS, ebooks, music, contacts, a calculator, and basic PIM, but for remote work its not much good for anything beyond tethering to my phone for an emergency SSH session, which is doable, but really only for emergency use.
To work comfortably I need a little more than the ipaq can provide. So when traveling for any length if time I’ve carried an old 700 Mhz Celeron Thinkpad that I bought back when I first started Cotse. It’s been long due for an upgrade but it has been enough to do what I need to do, so I have not been able to justify the expense of an upgrade (you save a lot of money not upgrading just because something newer and better is out). To be honest, I don’t know if I can actually justify it now, but when I saw the latest umpcs, it made sense.
I splurged and bought an OQO. The OQO is a umpc, this was a new term for me. It means Ultra Mobile PC, the goal being a pc in your pocket. I have always called my ipaq my pocketpc. After all, Microsoft calls it that. But the OQO really is a pocket pc. The one I bought is 1.6 Ghz, 1 Gig RAM, 120 Gig drive with Sprint EVDO (I got Sprint to have access to both EVDO networks, Verizon via tethering to my cell if needed) with a 5″ LCD that runs at 800×480 and can zoom to 1,200×720 interpolated (which looks surprisingly good for interpolated).
I chose the OQO over the field of umpcs, some faster (read Sony UX), because of a few things. One was the integrated EVDO rev A, having that built in frees me quite a bit. The OQO also had the best fit and feel. It feels solid, it looks sleek, it is in outside design, near perfect. Nice screen, vivid, bright, and clear. It’s also an active digitiser, so inking is far better on it. The keyboard is very nice, far more usable than the others and it also has a few other desirable features, like hardware based crypto that I have yet to dig into.
I tried to take some pictures, but my camera seems to be having some difficulty, so no pictures. So far I love the OQO. I realize I’m taking a slight risk with a young upstart company (a group of Apple techs formed OQO in 2000. Apple Computer apparently wasn’t interested in developing the worlds smallest computer at that time so they struck out with their own company. Full story), but it’s a calculated risk.
OQO is US based, growing well, and seem to be getting rave reviews for their service, at least US based (foreign is a different story, very young and small, not many partnerships yet). I bought the accidental damage 3 year extended coverage because I know full well that being the smallest and so new a design/product means I’ll be using the coverage at some point.
I’ll try to keep this blog updated with my experiences. So far it’s an awesome device that gives me a fully functional, always with me, PC with broadband access (seeing 1 MBit plus speeds in all my tests so far) that I can keep in my pocket and whip out and use wherever I am. This is a first for me and I’m finding it very useful and freeing in using it to manage Packetderm/Cotse.
