GearWERKZ TechBlog

It has been just under a month since I took delivery of my Fujitsu U820 UMPC from Newegg. This is not a device for everyone. Perhaps it is not even a device for anyone, except the handful of those of us who choose to use it. I would never try and sell anyone on this device for meeting their everyday computing needs. It is unquestionably a niche product, and a very expensive one at that. But I do want to take a post and answer some questions that I have had from a few friends, such as "Why?", and now that I have "How?"

Follow up:

First it might be worth it to cover why I was in the market for another UMPC after having gotten rid of my Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium earlier this year. The Sammy had been my second UMPC, preceded by the original Q1b. I really liked both of my Q1's, and put them to a good amount of use. But several design issues prevented any of my uses for them from being optimal.

The Q1b was predominantly too slow. The Q1 Ultra Premium, while peppier, was too thick, and had bad ergos. While it was not very heavy, it just did not fit in the hand naturally, nor did it pack well in a bag with another laptop. My other issue with the Q1 Ultra was that, despite its decent performance while in run, it seemed to take forever to come up out of standby. And its low profile form-factor meant that it was not well-suited to being left on and accessed routinely, since no matter where I had it set up I had to hunch over to see it.

As is the usual, I had a set of requirements when I went in search of the new device. I was looking for something that I could leave on all the time and could walk around the house with comfortably in my hand. I envisioned walking around the house taking notes, maintaining my checkbook or grocery list, or system administrator notes for various projects, or article ideas. I needed something that could help me keep my thoughts organized and was instantly accessible. I foresaw doing a good bit of web-browsing and eBook reading on the device. Below is an excerpt from my Evernote notebook as I organized my thoughts on what it was I needed:

• display larger than a smartphone's
• can be left on all the time, or instant on, low power requirements
• expect to use predominantly at home
• if in use on travel, expect to use in short durations (ie maybe not carry power supply? USB power available?)
• must have pen-interface, but active digitizer no longer required. Do not anticipate using this to draft lengthy notes, for that will use TabletPC, now that it will be more readily available
• must be flat, thin (thinner than previous Samsung Q1's...need to look up old height spec of Q1 and Q1 Ultra), easily manageable while held in the hand
• will use at work to potentially take quick side-notes at my desk (how to sync or xfr to tabletPC?), but would not use, say, for taking notes in class
• keyboard not required, but would be nice
• can not be as large as a netbook (so 7" screen max?)
• hard drive would be nice to be large enough to hold entire itunes music (but I can only have five machines...combine with purchase of DRM freeing current collection, and go to only DRM-free downloads - ie iTunes Plus?)
• if HD too expensive, can go with less, or an SSD, or can it use CF card from the LE1600 and I'll just put subsets of the iTunes archive on there. Or do I stream from the NAS?
• no more than $500
• must be available now; no pre-orders

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