Category Archives: Hardware

Tablet PCs

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Tablet PC’s come in all shapes and sizes. This is a quick look at tablet PCs on the market without keyboards and without potentially breakable hinges.
Electrovaya Inc. has the Scribbler SC-3100

Ace Asia Co., Ltd. has the T201

Fujitsu has the Stylistic ST5100

Itronix offerts the rugged Gobook Series

Motion Computing offers 3 different types of tablet PCs

of varying sizes and accessories

tabletkiosk offers a selection of tablets – they’re actually more UMPCs but come in varying degrees of price and capability

[Update]TabletKiosk is upgrading their line in 2008 with a modular unit and more grunt.

DRS-TS has a few imaginitively named portable tablets, such as the Hammerhead Xtreme

Then there’s the ulimate in ruggedised: the Xplore Technologies iX104C3Plus series

Then Amtek has this iTablet T221 going for around EUR 1,552.

The Axiotron Modbook is a modified Macbook. It’s the only tablet mac and the specs look very good – it’s fast and sensitive and has a 12800*800 resolution, so it’s useable as well. Of course, you should be able to install Vista on it too…

TabletPcTalk.com is a good site to keep track of what’s happening in this market

7″ Tablet PC running Windows CE has some fair specs. Would be good to see it running Linux!

ASUS Eee PC

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It looks like ASUS is onto a winner here: it has all the hype on its side, it has weight and formfactor on its side and most of all it has price on its side. Running from around $300 – $ 400 this is a very cheap laptop with a 7″ screen and a Linux interface that allows any idiot to do the most rudimentary things you need to do. OK so at 900Mhz it’s slightly underpowered, but for the price you’re getting a seriously good deal. The market is undeveloped nations, but considering the size, I wonder how long it will be before it becomes an accessory for westerners who are finished pulling around huge laptops. All the components are solid state, so it’s also very reliable.

Forbes has a nice story on the history of this machine.

USBmicro Controller

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USBmicro is a USB electrical device interface. It comes in two flavours: the U401 and the U421. The main difference is the form factor.


There’s quite a lot of documentation on the site how to program and install them

Kadtronix sells the unit with interface software, making the programming quite a bit easier

They also have a good tutorial, with instructions how to fit it to a motion detector

Home Domination has the controller and bundles it with several types of sensors, such as temperature sensors and it’s own software

But if you just want to buy the units themselves, they’re not expensive at around EUR. 28,- at dontronics

Samsung Hybrid Hard Disk

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Samsung has unveiled their new hybrid hard drives (HHD) composed of storage in the form of partially platter based (rotating) storage and flash memory storage. The flash memory works like a prefetch cache, but because it’s much faster than platter technology there should be significant speed increases on bootup and with writing small files. Once the buffer is full, data is transferred to the platters to free up room. Large files will be streamed directly to the platters. They’re starting with 128 and 256 MB of flash memory on the drives. Unfortunately the drives will only be compatible with Windows Vista, due to the memory management technologies employed in the OS. Samsung is specifically catering to laptop users first using this technology as the idea is that not spinning up the platters will also make a significant power saving.