Laptop upgrades are not difficult to complete yourself, and there are three key upgrades that you can easily accomplish to make your laptop run faster.  These will also give your laptop a higher resale value when you decide to replace it.

One of the most simple laptop upgrades to complete yourself is to upgrade your operating system. If you are running Windows XP or Windows Media Center, upgrading to Windows Vista is a good idea.  You will be able to take advantage of the many features of Windows Vista, as well as enhance the speed of your system.  An upgrade to Windows Vista for the Home Basic edition is under $100 and is worth it to enhance the efficiency of your system. (More…)

Let’s just say that I’m underwhelmed. While the “nearly full-sized” keyboard is a nice touch, the rest of the unit is either too much (MP3 controls, Gamepad controls) or too litttle (the screen). Of course, I haven’t held one of these in my hands, so I’ll certainly reserve judgment. It could be the best thing since pizza. See the S-X-gen in action.

Also made availabe today are some additional specs on the unit:

“The S-XGen has a robust shock-proof 20GB hard drive, a 6.5″ X 3.8″ X 1.125″ form factor, including a TFT Transflective Touch Screen viewable in sunlight, 802.11b/g and Bluetooth connectivity, SD MMC and Compact Flash sockets, 2 USB 2.0 ports, and a near full-sized Qwerty folding keyboard, stereo speakers and inputs/outputs, docking socket and tri-band cell phone communications capability. GPS capability will be available as an add-on.”

You can read more via S-XGens latest press release. Again, you can see the video here.

Today OQO announced that they are making some strategic executive appointments to “address their ass-whipping at the hand of the Sony UX180P company’s rapid growth this year.” Here’s the bottom-line:

“OQO Inc., leader of the UMPC-Pro market and creator of the world’s first smallest fully-functional Windows XP computer today announces that it has named Bob Rosin as the senior vice president of marketing and alliances, and Fred Bowes as the vice president of worldwide sales. These two strategic appointments further confirm OQO’s growth in the mobile PC market and position the company to address its rapid growth through 2006 and beyond.”

You can read more about OQO’s strategic direction, the appointments and their executives’ “midas touch” (thier words, not mine), by reading the full press release.

You’ve seen the previews, heard rumors of people ordering units and you have already read the full manual. And now Asustek has made it all super-official. The Asus R2H is now available! The new announcement doesn’t offer anything much more than we already know, but an interview with The Commercial Times last night does yield a couple of things of interest:

“Targeting the in-car segment, Asustek aims to ship a combined total of 3,000 units of the R2H UMPCs and the R1H tablet PCs a month, Benson Lin, president for Asia-Pacific at Asustek, was quoted by the Commercial Times as saying.”

You can read a bit more over at DigiTimes.

The interweb is all a buzz today because someone is giving software away. In this case it’s Ilium’s Inscribe program for UMPCs and UMPC-like devices. I have not used it myself, but it is allegedly a great text-entry alternative. Here’s what ZDNet had to say:

“You can use InScribe as a standard tappable QWERTY keyboard or you can use it like it is designed to be used with sliding your stylus across the keyboard and when you change direction the character you turned on appears so text entry can be made very fast and fluid. You can maximize the keyboard for the UMPC screen, change the transparency, and even create a custom keyboard layout.”

More here.

A lengthy, thoughtful and excellent view of Windows Vista running on an Amteck T700 UMPC. This comes to us from our buds over at JKKmobile. Nice work.

We’ve been predicting the UMPC uber-remote for since the beginning. If this years CEDIA is any clue, the all-controlling UMPC is quickly becoming a reality (CEDIA is the tradeshow of choice for the Home Theater industry).

HomeLogic has also taken a liking to the 7-inch touchscreen that runs Windows XP tablet edition. While the $1,000ish device has questionable appeal for other applications, it makes perfectly good sense for home control, says HomeLogic’s Joe Lautner. “I wish it had a docking station, though,” he says. Running HomeLogic’s OneHome software, the UMPC can do anything that HomeLogic’s own touchscreens can do—and more, of course, because it’s a full-blown PC.

I hadn’t actually given this much thought, but I’m surprised the Q1 and other UMPCs don’t have docks. Interesting. You can read more about the upcoming UMPC uber-remote over at Talk about Cedia.

[Via Gizmodo]

Another day, another super-important UMPC poll. This time were looking at the world of UMPC accessories. While we don’t have the spectrum of choices that, say, iPod owners have, the UMPC is definitely getting a portfolio of useful after-market add-ons as it matures. What’s the most important one to you? If you pick “other” make sure to add a comment to the post with what it is.

Remember, your opinion counts (as one faceless vote among hundreds).