Updated: The UMID M1 has been available in Asia for a while but it’s only just starting to get available outside of Korea. Pocketables has received a unit from Australia and the obligatory unboxing has ensued. The UMID is basically a tiny clamshell that tries to be a UMPC and a netbook at the same time, but in my opinion fails at both. That failure is magnified when you factor in the price range of A$1,000-A$1,400 for the M1. UPDATE: these prices are Australian Dollars, the U.S. equivalent is around $800-$1,000.
I had the chance to play with the UMID M1 at the CES early this year and I found the keyboard to be too small to be taken seriously. It was not even a good thumb-typing experience for me and overall I found the device to be too darn small to be a clamshell. The specs of the M1 are typical of little PCs, 1.3 GHz Atom, 512 MB memory, 16 GB SSD and a webcam (hooray!). The tiny size of the M1 forced UMID to make some design compromises, the most notable being the need for these goofy adapters:
Check out the unboxing photos to see how attractive the M1 is and be sure and follow the Pocketables continuing coverage of the UMID.


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