Kevin. What about Midinux and more importantly Ubuntu’s Mobile Embedded project. Joing the mailing list and you’ll see Intel, Ubuntu, Nokia, Maemo and lots of others working on this already. They were advertising for staff yesterday.

CE is going to be crap *scuse my French) unless they can beef up the browser exerience somehow but development on RISC platfor is always going to be expensive and lagging behind core browser developments on Safari, FF and IE.

Xpe is a nice solution but not tailoered for 800×480 so at the moment we’re left with no optiised OS at all.

I would encourage anyone who believes there is a space for a new mobile-oriented OS to get into the GMAE project (http://www.umpcportal.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=515) the Intel MIDIA (http://www.umpcportal.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=498) or the Ubuntu project (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MobileAndEmbedded) All these projects are linked.
You won’t see anything from Microsoft in the next year or two so we should focus on the only solution we have at the moment.

Alternative routes to a new OS are Palm, RedHat (Sugar UI) and Pepper but I think Ubuntu is the one to focus on at the moment.

Steve

The Eee PC 701 looks suprising similar to the older Sony VAIO PCG-C1VN PictureBook.

And by the way, concluding from what i read over many pages, i don’t think iPhone runs a stripped down version of OS X. First of all, it has some kind of ARM processor, (ARM confirmed this) and OS X is written for x86 architecture (since the transition to Intel), so it can not be the same os. We can’t run windows xp on pdas. We could if MS compiled it for ARM, but even if they did, it would take a century to boot. (Remember the Pocket PCs running Windows 95? Yes there were emulators, but you get the idea) And iPhone can’t run third party apps (at least for now) If it was the normal OS X, it would run it’s applications. They just wrote a new OS (based on unix again as OS X) and named it OS X like MS do with Windows and Windows Mobile.

There is a time for a mobile version of winddows. It was windows ce. It did not take off to well with stripped down applications. I am using windows 2000 on a 8Gb flash card. The device is a fujitsu p1120. It is a very stable and usable OS. I can run windows media, divx and itunes, full ms office apps, quicken. It needs less ram and Hard (Flash)drive space. I think if Microsoft would allow OEMs to use older versions of software; the systems could be cheeper and faster. What slows down the hardware is the software. I had a HP 100lx that run dos. It was great at what it did. It had lotus 123, Quicken, and run off the shelf software for dos. I think this could be accomplished by doing the same thing, but with a later OS, such as windows 2000. Small form factor with older os that runs fast with slower hardware.

That is my 2 cents worth

Think from another angle (i believe it’s OEMs’ angle) : If you can run XPE, you can run XP, so why not just run with fully loaded XP?

Kevin, it sounds like you’ve hit on the raison d’etre for the Folio…

Your line of thinking also explains rumors of an ultra-portable MacBook running a stripped down version of OS X just as the iPhone has a stripped down version of OS X with an optimized GUI.

Ya the closest thing out there is XPe. In UMPC’s, I believe it’s used for the AVS in the Q1′s.
I don’t know.. maybe cell phones merging up with PC’s will solve the problem. Better support for touchscreens in Linux would help a lot.

JKK, that’s great and I’m familiar with XPe, but let me pose the question a different way: why aren’t there any UMPCs based on XPe? I don’t think the burden falls solely on the OEMs….

Your experience definitely sounds positive, so maybe it’s time for a fresh look at the OS driving these devices?

Microsoft allready has the lighter version, XP Embedded.
It’s oems whos job is to make it available.

I have been using xpe on my umpc for months now and I’m wery happy with it.

My setup: 4gb flash drive with xpe, ie7 and media player.
With those and some device specific software and some small apps my os/sw footprint is 700mb, 70mb ram, 18 prosesses…

I’d say it’s light ;) …and you can imagine how fast it is compared to Vista .

At this price point and with those specs, it would be a pretty sweet Ubuntu box (or Xubuntu more likely for speed).

I definitely think that MS should be making a light version of windows. As it is now I have many options in Linux to run a full desktop on a very low spec’d machine. Not so with Windows. They could pull it off.

In my opinion they also need to make a brand new shell to replace explorer. One that is focused on touch/pen input. New skins for every core app needed on a portable umpc-like device: IE/FF, explorer, a media player (similar to what they did with the Origami experience thing).

“What do you think, is there a time and place for a full version of Windows and a lighter version?” — I thought the time was years ago and I’ve been pushing it ever since.

I think the Eee PC 701, outside of the horrible name, is quite a compelling device. From what I see, you basically get a device that is more powerful and more functional than a N800, but only gives up in the way of a larger form factor. If these rumors of a $200 price tag are correct, this would certainly be the perfect device for me. A real keyboard, the possibility of running XP, and, oh yeah, damn cheap. I like the N800, but I also don’t like to spend $350+ on a device that doesn’t really do all I want to do.