The Future of the UMPC
I’ve been using my eo for months now and I have a pretty good idea of what I’d like to see change.
- The buttons on the UMPC should be configurable based on the application that is currently in use. A kludgy workaround is TabletButtonProfileManager.
- There should be a ‘Fn’ button that can be used to virtually double the number of programmable buttons on the UMPC. Fn-PageUp and PageUp could have two different mappings.
- It should be possible to configure one of the buttons to act as a ‘right-click’ meta button. This button would tell the screen to treat a tap as a right click.
- Highly granular motion sensors. If you’ve ever played WarioWare Twisted, you’d know how powerful motion sensitivity can be. Imagine scrolling a spreadsheet up/down and left/right with very slight movements.
- Two battery slots so you can hot-swap in fresh batteries.
- A new power-save mode that turns off the backlight and screen and forces the cpu into it’s slowest mode – all with one click. Obviously, this would be less intrusive than Stand By, but it would also be less of a power savings.
- Make it easy to switch from Stand By to Hibernate.
- Windows needs a new service pack so that new computers don’t take an hour to patch with Windows Update when they arrive.
The eo Extended Battery is out!!
TabletKiosk is selling them for $149! 4 hours from the extended life battery and 2 from the original means 6 hours. That fixes my biggest gripe about the eo!!!
Now, if I can only get one before my trip to Anchorage!!
Source: ctitanic. Chippy has a photo!
Gameboy Advance Games – Digitylish, Digilux, bit Generations
Nintendo is launching a new series of non-traditional games for the Gameboy Advance soon. [Update: Minisites for each game.]
Here’s what I know:
- The first series launches in Japan on July 13. The second series launches a week later. No information on a US release date.
- The series used to be called Digitylish. Check out IGN’s 5/2005 footage here.
- The series is now called Digilux in the US. IGN has US names for most of the games: Boundish, Chromatron, Dotstream, Orbiter, Rotohex, and Sound Voyager.
- In Japan, the series is called bit Generations. Play-Asia has them on sale as imports for $25 each.
- British Gaming Blog has screenshots.
- The official Japanese site (with video) is here.
I love games that offer really new and unusual gameplay. Nintendo and its allies are the best at it. WarioWare Twisted, Yoshi Touch and Go, Feel the Magic, Pac Pix, etc. Obviously, I’d prefer that these games were all on one cart and had more reasonable prices, but they all look like fun games, so maybe I’ll just have to buy them one at a time. Starting with dotStream.
John Tokash 