This has been an exciting day full of cool UMPC news!

AllTP.com will be taking EO preorders very soon and the manufacturer, TabletKiosk, has order forms up at MSRP.  I’m guessing that AllTP’s price will be a little cheaper than MSRP.

The specs look great for the price!  I’ll have one before the end of April (I’m 3rd in line with a deposit at AllTP) and I’ll be sure to post all about it here – maybe something like the ‘diary’ I did with the IO Digital Pen.

The Via C7 cpu that TabletKiosk is using sounds like a real workhorse, by the way, with low power consumption.

dlmag has a MUST-WATCH video (and writeup) of the DualCor cPC.  It’s out of my price range, but if they brought the $1500 price closer to $1000, it would be a no brainer.

The DualCor cPC is a 1.5 GHz handheld that runs on XP Tablet PC edition.  At the flip of an on-screen switch, though, it runs Windows Mobile on a much less battery hungry CPU.  Really, this is a great idea!

One way for vendors to keep costs down on the UMPC devices would be to have versions that ship without RAM or a hard drive.  Considering that I will most likely want to upgrade both of those items, I’d rather get a barebones unit so I don’t have to resell those components.

This is assuming that the hard drives will be the standard laptop 2.5 inchers and that the RAM is also standard.

Today, I started porting one of my homebrew pda games to C#.  This particular game has always been difficult to play on a typical PDA.  The many touch points are hard to hit reliably on a small screen.  I think the 7″ screen of a UMPC/Origami device will be perfect.

Anyway, I’m starting to think about the game’s impact on battery life.  After several searches, I haven’t found anyone who has put together tests comparing various GDI+ effects and their impacts on battery life.  When I get closer to completing the port (probably another weekend or two), I’ll try to put together my own tests.  I’m guessing I’ll have two graphical modes for the game – one that’s beautiful and abuses the battery and one that is relatively simple and does its best to preserve battery life.