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…)

is a Suction Cup strong enough to hold a UMPC? That’s one of the question I had when I started my project to convert my UMPC in the perfect “carputer”.

Well, here is a picture that will give you the answer.

Suction Cup test

I uploaded a set of pictures to show how flexible this system from RAM-MOUNT is and how it can be changed very easily to fit your needs.



Mobile-review.com has a very nice review of the next version of Windows Mobile, currently code-named “Crossbow”.  (It’ll probably be released as “Windows Mobile 6″. 

The new version of operating system is destined to fill the time gap between Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows Mobile Photon (Windows Mobile 7.0?). Truly significant updates are few, which, on top of that, are aimed at reacting to the change in the market environment. Early in 2007 Microsoft is thoroughly revamping its software range with Windows Vista, Office 2007, MS Exchange 2007. Therefore, against such impressive background an updated version Windows Mobile was simply bound to come out.

For the most part it’s not a major update.  It’s still running on the same CE kernel as Windows Mobile 5, for example.  But there are two new features that will make me run right out and buy a device with it (or hope my HTC Apache, aka PPC-6700, gets an upgrade) as soon as possible:

The new version of of Pocket Outlook will now support HTML email and message flagging.  These fix two of my top three complaints about Pocket Outlook, the third being the lack of ability to categorize emails.

Unfortunately, the rest of the applications, including Internet Explorer, are not receiving major changes, however Microsoft is working to improve one-handed operation throughout, which will be nice.

Source: Mobile-review.com Review of Windows Mobile 6.0 for PPC (Crossbow) operating system

(Hat tip: jk On The run)



All the big financial magazines are jumping on the UMPC bandwagon. First it was Fortune. Now it is Forbes (via the AP). This time around, Forbes is reviewing the ill-named PepperPad. The bottom-line?

On the whole, the Pad is a respectable try, but I slightly preferred Samsung’s UMPC despite its failings (like the lack of a keyboard). That’s mainly because it was possible to install familiar Windows software on the UMPC, and easier to transfer music and videos from my desktop PC.

If you ask us (and, yes, we know you didn’t), the PepperPad is an underpowered mess. It may look “neat” on paper, but when it comes to power, functionality, expandability, and just about everything else, the PepperPad comes up short. Oh, and it’s ugly. Plus, any branding folks assoicated with the naming of this device should be fired.

Read the full review via Forbes.

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Project Origami lives!

I would so totally buy this today! Very, very cool.

See the incredible, folding UMPC right here!

I just found about this new UMPC at OrigamiPortal.com:

I’m tired of reading Paul Miller comments about UMPCs, with all due respect!

As much flak we’ve given UMPCs throughout the first generation, at least most of those devices know what they’re all about: frustrating users with short battery life and lacking input options.

Is any current UMPC owner frustrated? Because the only frustration that I know of is from those who do not own one.

How many notebooks have a battery life of more than 3 hours? you can count with your fingers those with a battery life of 3 hours or more. I have owned 5 notebooks and none of them had a battery life of more than 2 hours and 30 mins.

Do you know of any TabletPC owner frustrated because he does not have a keyboard? Come on, give me a break.

I used to think about engadget as a serious page, but not any more.

My friend Steve from Carrypad.com is a damn lucky guy. I do not know how he does it but he gets all the cool stuff to review before anybody else (hey Steve… I have not got yet Vega!). He published today a review of the Eleksen Fabric Keyboard with a lot of good pictures like this one.

IMG_2192

And the most important thing, he calculated for us the Speed Coefficient of this keyboard which is 0.545, this means that if I use this keyboard I should be able to type around 29 WPM (I type 55 WPM in a normal keyboard, 55*0.545=29WPM). Like Steve said, this is not bad at all. I got only 0.27 when I reviewed Brando mini BT Keyboard. This fabric keyboard is a lot faster than the on screen keyboard.

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