The Umpc And The Future Of Gp Handhelds

[invinciblegod]

I recently read around about the UMPC and how crappy it is. They said it is expensive and has bad battery life. However, they will eventually solve those problems. What I'm thinking is that in maybe 4 or 5 years, if UMPC's are still around, they may have some sort of budget $200 UMPC that can run windows. When that happens, what will become of the gp handhelds? If the UMPC ever gets popular with budget versions readily available, it will be capable of running that vast majority of Windows emulators (epsxe, zsnes, vba). Even the ones we have now can most likely play VBA and ZSNES (I dont actually own one) with its celeron processor. Codecs will also probably work for any video file. Won't that eventually make the gp handhelds obsolete?

 

[Shikaku]

In order to extend battery life on such a power sucking device, one of two things has to happen:

1. A new battery technology has to be made that is much more powerful, as rechargable, and as safe as the lithium ion battery (although if you've ever seen a lithium ion fire, you'd think twice about its safety)

2. A new lightsource that is even better than LEDs. I doubt this will happen anytime soon.

Also forgot about harddrives. Those have to go, they take up way too much energy and are fragile. Luckily flash memory takes up much less power and is getting cheaper and cheaper everyday. The have plans on using a 20-40 GB flash drive instead of a harddrive using a filesystem like yafss to take care of some of the disadvantages of flash memory.

This is one major problem these devices have, and that is why they are not widespread. Unlike the GP2X, it is expensive, power consuming, and probably not very fast.

The GP2X on the other hand uses much less power, is very cheap, but has unfamiliar hardware specifications to code for (ARM).

Take your pick.

 

[invinciblegod]

Well, I DID say 4 to 5 years later...

 

[dadioflex]

Well, I DID say 4 to 5 years later...

So we'll worry about it in 4 or 5 years time. Right now, for the money, there's nothing to touch the GP2X.

 

[Trashman]

Plus, were all here talking about it coz weve got 2x'ers, not umpc's.
Dont know about you but theres something addictive about this korean quirkyness that i love, and some regulation windows thingy just wouldnt do it for me. B)

 

[Jarska333]

Well, I DID say 4 to 5 years later...

So we'll get a gp3x, then.

 

[Anhaedra]

There is an asian handheld PC that runs XP and it has a 1GHz processor and gets about 6 hours of battery life. Unfortunately I don't remember what it is called.

They should use AMD Geode processors in these, they are low-power X86 cpus, some don't even require a heatsink.