Directions in UMPC-land

Dream on :)

> Given that the size of a UMPC won't ever reach that of a cell phone

I hope that's not the case. I'm waiting for a cellphone which can project a display in one
direction, and a keyboard in another, using the miniature laser and led projectors coming out.

I don't care much about the CPU, memory or storage. As long as it runs an X server, SSH
client, and has network access, I'm good to go. That's how I usually work, anyhow.

What you want is a OLED display. I don't know about the power consumption of
the thing, but I expect it to be quite a bit less then the current
generation of stuff.

You see with current LCDs the display requires a backlight. In most laptops,
like my Dell Inspiron 1420n, the display is backlit using floresent
lighting. With my EEE the backlight is made using LEDs. 

So you have this going continiously. The whole display lit at the same
brightness and then the pixels filter out the light.. blocking it out to
make it black, filtering it to make different colors. 

So as you can imagine it's a bit innefficient and the colors are rather
bland. Blacks can't be very black, etc etc. There is a limit to how well a
LCD display can filter light and how well it can block it, so the main way
manufacturers increase contrast ratio is increasing overal the brightness of
the display.

With OLEDs the pixels themselves are made with special ink that can light
up. So the pixels themselves are the things generating the light.. that way
there is no requirement for backlights. The display can be transparent
plastic if you wanted to be. Thus you should be able to do things like use a
dark theme for GTK if you want to save electricity. Also the contrast ratio
is excellent since black is realy 'off' and white is realy 'on' instead of
filtering the light coming from behind. Colors are much more vibrant, etc
etc. Your realy looking at million to one contrast ratios vs 1000 to
one ratios with current tech. 

The only problem with OLEDs, which keep them out of laptops and such
currently is the lifespan of the organic compounds used in the displays.
From what I understand blue is the most difficult color to keep for a long
time and will go first.  Sony is coming out with desktop-style displays
though...

I don't know about total power consumption either, but I think it would be
very good.

Also another cool property of them is that they can be flexible displays.
That is you can take a OLED display and wrap it up like a scroll. You could
have displays that pull into a protective plastic tube that you put into
your pocket and pull out like a window blind. 

If you think about it, having the ability to use moldable or flexible
plastic films should lead to a whole new group of consumer electronics.
Another fantastic item would be heads-up displays that wear like a pair of
sunglasses. It would be fantastic to have a smart phone device like the
OpenMoko/Neo1973 stuff that would communicate with your glasses with a high
speed bluetooth-like 'PAN'. I don't know what you'd use for data input
though. I suppose thumb keyboards and, hell, use the phone itself as a
motion-sensitive mouse.

I think long-term smartphone-like devices will be the future for personal
mobile computing. Right now they are puting things like 300-400mhz
proccessor with 256 megs of RAM into a device you can put in your pocket.
Intel is coming out with it's MID stuff and a new bunch of cpus specificly
designed for that stuff and they strongly recommend Linux for that platform.

Combining with that the ability for these devices to be used as X terminals,
or have them connect ad-hoc to larger displays wirelessly, and such then
there realy isn't any reason why these devices could not be a effective
replacement for most forms of computing people do on laptops and desktops
currently.
 

I enjoy LWN's background and Grumpy Editor series as much as the next guy. 
They're not exactly news, either. But I find the above artice of 
questionable quality. There is way too little fact here, writing 
about things that might be in a few years from now. It's more a commentary 
or an editorial, though less relevant than most of those would be.

This is not the kind of article I subscribe to lwn for, sorry.

I just want an EeePc or an Everex style device with a 1024x768 screen. 800xN is too small.

> Battery life is the achilles heel of mobile devices; some kind of
breakthrough in power consumption or energy storage needs to happen for 
big strides to be made in this area. Because of weight considerations, 
today's UMPCs tend to have small batteries and three hours or less of 
battery life.

N810 idle standby time is over a week on full battery. When you're not 
using it, just lock the screen&keys (with the lock key) and put it to your 
pocket.  I think UMPCs could indeed improve their battery usage (although 
they have more power and larger screens, they have also larger 
batteries)...

Power will be solved via Pu239+Pb batteries. While a little heavy they have a lifetime of
years... the cleanup would be no worse than what happens to most batteries these days.. and
what is random genetic mutation when you can have the coolest (ok hottest) laptop around.

;)

>>some kind of breakthrough in power consumption or energy storage needs to happen for big
strides to be made in this area.<<

No: the OLPC-XO has already shown how it could be done *now* without the need of a
breakthrough: given the small power consumption of an OLPC, if it was fitted with a "normal"
laptop battery, a full day of heavy usage is possible.
And in fact this is enough for nearly all usage: you charge the laptop at night and then in
the day enjoy true portability without worrying about your battery charge..

Several days of usage would be nice sure, but truly one full day of heavy usage is enough for
the majority of use.

So I hope that Pixel Xi (the company made by the woman who invented the screen of the OLPC)
succeed in making an UMPC laptop for 'normal users' using OLPC's technology..

Truly, the only reason why we don't have this kind of laptop now is that laptop makers are
very conservative..