Everyone is making the same product. The market is going to saturate, and companies will lose money.

Why do we not see more differentiation?
Who wouldn't like to see a half-dozen PepperPad3 and WiBrain devices?

http://www.wibrain.com/index.html
http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/17/hanbits-pepper-pad-3-returns-with-intels-atom-inside/

Split keyboard UMPC can be used like a PSP on the airplane, or in the car.

While you might be able to take the whole base and screen bezel apart, and install the 3G antenna. The non-review Dell Mini-9 computers DO NOT HAVE the Mini-Card CONNECTOR on the board.

If the Mini-Card slot was present, then people who do not need G3 could install a second Mini-Card SSD. RAID-0 could make up for the slow write speed.

Yes, we in the USA all feel poor these days. Unfortunately that is what happens when a country ship all value-adding jobs overseas. It didn't really hit home until we funded a 500 billion dollar war deficit by borrowing money from other countries. Now our dollar is worth a lot less.

That said, I was hoping for a lower price on the low end. I really wanted to be able to pick one up for 300 USD and then upgrade it if I could stand the keyboard. I just wonder if you can buy a larger disk from Dell later.

512MB DDR2 at 533MHz [Included in Price]
1GB DDR2 at 533MHz [add $25]

4GB Solid State Drive [Included in Price]
8GB Solid State Drive [add $35]
16GB Solid State Drive [add $75]

No Camera Option [Included in Price]
Integrated 0.3M Pixel Webcam [add $15]
Integrated 1.3M Pixel Webcam [add $25]

Dell Optimized Keyboard [Included in Price]
Regular Keyboard [add $you wish]

This is not aimed at people like the readers here. It is aimed at scared people with too much money, who are afraid of being robbed, and who probably don't understand technology.

In the upper-class 'hood where I was looking at homes (out of my price range), a "safe room" for "home invasion" robberies is a common feature of remodeled mini-mansions. The idea is that when the home invasion van shows up outside your home, you just get the kids out of bed -- give them each a moment in the bathroom -- and then stuff the whole family into the walk-in closet that is called a safe room. Then, and only then, are the invaders allowed to brake down the door.

With the growing income gap between normal and rich, Schlage may think that getting $13 a month from the top 0.2 % of the population is enough. Lots of services play on the fear (and guilt) of the rich.

Why is this patentable?

It sounds to me like a work of authorship, like a book. This is not a machine that takes significant risks and deserves years of holding everyone else in the industry back so that we can reward the huge investment that Apple has made.

Our patent system is broken, and Apple loves it!

So do we get to hear about what a btch you ex- was next?
Do we have to read your poetry about growing up in a suburb of [city name here]?

Just keep us informed in frequently posted light reads. While pushing industry people to make the good stuff come out faster and for less.

This is not exciting.

AMD should take on Atom and Larrabee (next-gen hybrid CPU / GPU, for Nehalem generation) with one chip. This chip would have 4 or 8 cores that would get the advantages of a shared cache.

AMD needs to choose a core that they already have running, so that this project can get to market fast. The Geodes (AMD Geode LX900 @600mhz) in the UMPCs and OLPCs are not that bad, and consume 2-5 watts -- including graphics and chipset. Only a watt or two of that is the core. AMD also was faster then Intel in the 486 and 586 generations.

Good:
If AMD put 4 of these Geode LX cores in a chip and gave them a shared L2 and graphics oriented SIMD instructions, they could match the Atom & 945gs pair. The low-cost Intel Atom with the 945-series chipset is drawing 14 watts (11+ watts are chipset). We will only know if this is a good chip when we know AMD's full platform power draw. This is the total of the chipset (with IDE, sata, pcix, usb, fan control, etc.)

Better:
Or go back further and use an in-order core like the AMD586. Add a vector unit that has SSE and new graphics instructions (remove the 80-bit floating point unit, trap and emulate). If 8 of these cores were to share a memory controller, L2-cache, and a branch prediction unit, the product would be really flexible.

When the chip is addressed as one full x86 core, the memory controller and branch prediction unit could be designed to use speculative execution to appear to be an super-scalar core (Atom competitor). If the processor hits a branch instruction, it issues the "taken" instruction stream to one CPU and the "not taken" instruction stream to the next CPU.

The branch predictor/L2 cache/memory controller would have to keep track of the writes by each core, and what instruction path the core was on. When the real path of the program is known the branch predictor/L2 cache/memory controller would discard the writes of the core that was down the wrong path, and commit the writes of the core that was on the taken path. With 8 cores you can be working on 8 states, or 3 binary branches out. I have no idea how complicated this is, but speculative execution is not a new idea.

The same chip addressed as 8 cores is a Larrabee competitor. In this mode the L2 acts as a normal shared L2. The memory controller also acts like a normal shared memory controller. The branch predictor may not be used at all, or may just be prefetching the instructions and data down the most likely path for each CPU.

Note:
Work on re-thinking the 486 and 586 cores for mobile devices is already a topic of papers.
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/memoryLogix.pdf

Why does it cost another $40 to get the 20 inch cable rather then the 8 inch cable?

Otherwise a good idea. But why not combine all that people want into one keyboard: quiet mechanical key switches along with ergonomics?

Small, small numbers of people have died for acts of terrorism, yet we spend huge amounts of money fighting terrorism. We also give up our freedom and privacy for this non-threat.

The point of terrorism appears to be to REPLACE THE COLD WAR. It keeps everyone afraid, and keeps letting our government officials spend our tax money on overpriced equipment from their corporate friends.

Sad truth.

P.S. I would tell you all the things that regularly slip through the checkpoints, but I do not want to get in trouble. The TSA are totally incompetent, and that is proof that we do not need the TSA.

.

The TSA is just genuflection to the police state. It is a physical reminder that we are meant to be afraid.

Get two single drive units for $40.

VANTEC NexStar NST-D100SU Plastic 2.5" or 3.5" USB 2.0 & eSATA Hard Drive Dock

It may not be as cool as two slots in one block, but it is cheaper and flexible.