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…)

According to VIA’s Technologies President, we will see more UMPCs using this processor. They showcased Yesterday in Taiwan two UMPCs using VIA and he added that “2008 and 2009 will be a turning point for VIA in the UMPC market. The company’s UMPC business will see explosive growth during 2008 and 2009″

The Global Market estimate for next year is around 130 millions of UMPCs!

is this the UMPC Fiasco that some USA Magazines and Web pages were talking about?

[Source]

Time Magazine has declared the PS3 a bust in it’s December 25th issue. It didn’t mention the Zune or UMPCs so they must be doing ok. Then again, there’s nothing named the Wii going up against the Zune or UMPC’s!

We’re in that slow news cycle working through the holidays and building up to CES. All the major Tablet PC and UMPC sites have jumped on the new Tablet Kiosk extended battery pack that works with their Sahara line of tablets, EO line of UMPC’s and potentially a lot of other devices. You know it’s a slow news week when a battery gets all the hype!

That being said, I think Tablet Kiosk did the right thing in announcing this now.  It got noticed! It wouldn’t have gotten noticed at CES. Batteries aren’t sexy, but devices with long battery lives are so give your EO or Sahara a Britney Spears makeover for Christmas with a Tablet Kiosk M3400 Powerbank.

I wrote about Readyboost a few weeks ago but I think that that was not enough. Please, before you jump and start buying Flash Cards, Memory Sticks or whatever you are thinking to use with this feature of Vista, check this post.

EverNote has a new beta out of the 2.0 release and it adds a bunch of new features.  This is one of the better note taking applications available and it’s very well suited to tablets and UMPCs.  It makes good use of ink and is the only major note taker that uses the “toilet paper roll” method of organizing your notes.  Each note appears at the end of the previous one and you can scroll through all of them quite easily.  This new beta release looks to add some very slick to features, too.  Check ‘em out below the cut. (More…)

 WebCamera Plus from Ateksoft is an interesting little piece of software.  For $14.90 USD, it lets you use the camera in your Windows Mobile device as a webcam when the device is tethered to your PC.  In playing around with it a bit with my Sprint PPC-6700 (HTC Apache), I found that the picture quality wasn’t fantastic.  But then the picture quality on my PDA isn’t all that great generally.  That said, this fits a unique niche, so if you want an easy way to get a webcam without actually carrying around a webcam, this is for  you.

WebCamera Plus key features:
- Transforms your PDA or Smartphone to high-resolution web-camera.
- Can work through any connection: USB ActiveSync, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G, LAN.
- Compatible with almost all modern Smartphones and PDAs.
- Can be used as web-camera in many programs: Skype, MSN Messager, Yahoo Messager, Virtual Dub and many others.
- Can capture device screen and transmit video to Desktop PC.

A bit of oddness:  In beta testing, this application was combined with CoolCamera, another tool from Ateksoft, but for the release version, they’ve pulled them apart.  Not sure why…

Source: Ateksoft | WebCamera Plus

The last week Origami Team member Dustin came back alive to OrigamiProject Blog and posted a little bit about Origamis Future.

In the coming year we’ll see new hardware manufactures enter the market, new designs that offer built in keyboard functionality, and even the reality of “always connected” with integrated 3G access. - He said.

Sounds good, but… The last Saturday I went to John U. Lloyd Beach State Park. This park is around 1.5 miles East of Fort Lauderdale International Airport, this Park is a piece of land/beach close to Fort Lauderdale from where the farer building is about less than a mile. And guess what, the signal on my Cingular Cell phone was poor. That poor that I almost could not get my emails via a BT GPRS connection. We are not talking here about the middle of California Desert, we are talking about South Florida Beaches ones of the most visited Beaches in the whole World. And I say South Florida Beaches because this is something that happens in almost everywhere in these Beaches. So, about what “all time connectivity” we are talking? The Cell Phone System in USA is Bad and Expensive. It’s at the same level than we see in some under developed Countries in Latin America. It’s not the Phone System that we see in Europe, Japan, Korea and even some parts of China.

To talk about to be connected all time we have to start talking about to get our phone system at the same level than in Europe. Then we can talk about “always connected” Origamis. Now, this is just a dream.

I took the family on an Alaskan cruise over the summer. Needless to say, that put a dent in the technology budget and I have to lower my sights this Christmas. I wish the kids would quit whining about food, clothing, shelter and college and embrace technology instead.

Lots of sites have done a Christmas gift list with tablet or tech items like an infrared trash can. That’s too out there for me. (Infrared is so 1980’s. How about a Bluetooth trash can?) Warner Crocker at Gottabemobile.com has a nice list but it’s a little ethereal for my tastes. I can’t unwrap Vista drivers on the 25th, nor can I point my parents to a website and say “I’d like Skype quality to be better for Christmas, get me that”.

So I’ve decided to put up my REAL Christmas list to help you find something you might actually be able to buy for the UMPC geek in your life. (If you don’t have a UMPC geek in your life, your spouse probably does. After all, YOU’RE the one reading this post!)

 Hollux Compact Flash GPS - I’m jealous of the embedded GPS in the Asus R2H but I’m unwilling to give up the media advantage of the Q1. Since it’s easier to add GPS to a Q1 than to attach better speakers to the R2H, I want this CF GPS card. It appears to have drivers for XP and since it’s CF, I don’t have another USB thingy sticking out from the Q1. (Under $60 US)

Microsoft Streets and Trips - I have to have software to go with the GPS! (Under $40 US)

Samson USB Microphone - I’m wanting to start a podcast for another website I own (sadly it has to do with accounting software, so it’s even geekier than UMPC’s). I’ve said before that a UMPC may be the ultimate podcasting machine and as good as the array microphones are on the Q1, I’d like an external microphone as well. (Under $50 US)

Ram Mount for the Q1 - This is what I need to mount the Q1 in the car. My 45 minute commute home was an hour an half last night, in the rain, past 3 malls. This is quickly becoming a need, not a want.  (Under a $100 US, price depends on the mounting components you pick.)

Samsung Blackjack (Cingular) - My trusty Audiovox SMT 5600 Smartphone is showing some wear. My wife actually said “Oh my god, look at your phone! It’s all beaten up”.  I’ll commit tablet PC heresy here and say that I prefer a Smartphone to a Pocket PC phone. Once in a while I need a break from the stylus. Everything I’ve read says this is the phone for me, except for battery life and no headphone jack. It does come with 2 batteries and I’d rather use  a Bluetooth headset to get rid of the cords so I should be ok. (About $200 US with 2yr plan. I’ve seen it as low as $150.)