UMPC Battery Life

Ultra-Mobile PC (part 2)



One of the biggest issues for any portable device is how it
uses power and whether its batteries can run an entire
eight-hour day without having to be recharged. While the UMPC
is still too new to determine whether this will be the case,
there are several indications from Microsoft staff and from
analysts that it will be a very power-hungry device. Part of
the problem is that 7-inch screen, which consumes a great
deal of power. Microsoft is aiming for at least a two-hour
battery profile, but early testers say that even that amount
of time will be hard to deliver. This means that batteries
won't be able to last as long as watching your average movie
on the UMPC.

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research wrote in his blog,
"What is missing? Battery life. Right now these machines
really need to be sold with a higher capacity battery if
you're going to use one as a life style device going through
the day."

There are numerous notebooks available today that offer three
or more hours of battery life, including ones from Sony,
Fujitsu and Motion Computing. Of course, these are all larger
form factors and thus able to have bigger batteries included
to last longer.

To counteract this issue, Microsoft has tried to finesse
things by offering more advanced power management on the UMPC.
Like many of today's more advanced multimedia laptops, the
unit will have a special quick boot sequence that will bring
up an embedded OS to run movies or play music files.

Dustin Hubbard at Microsoft writes in his blog, "The Samsung
unit actually has 2 boot modes on a 3 way power switch - On,
Off and AVS Multimedia (that's their name for this mode).
AVS Multimedia can do near instant on by booting into what
appears to be XP Embedded (as far as I can tell that is what
they are doing) and allows you to play movies, music and
photos without requiring you to boot into full XP. That gives
you 2 advantages; presumably better battery life by not
having so many services running in the background and fast
cold boot startup for media only consumption."

Touch Pack Enhancements

Microsoft has developed a special series of operating system
enhancements to the tablet OS to take advantage of the UMPC
platform. Called the "Touch Pack," these enhancements will
optimize the touch screen experience. It has five
applications: a program launcher, a series of touch
improvements to the normal Windows UI, a Brilliant Black skin
for Media player, a Sudoku game, and Dial Keys,
a thumb-based on-screen keyboard for inputting text.

"Currently the Touch Pack is available only to UMPC qualified
computers and only as an OEM pre-install," says Hubbard.
"The Touch Pack was designed specifically for small form
factor PCs."

Microsoft's Mitchell says, "Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows
XP software optimizes the touch screen user interface for
UMPCs to simplify navigation and ease-of-use while on the go.
The Touch Pack's customizable Program Launcher organizes
software programs into categories, and uses large buttons and
icons to make it easy to find and open your favorite
applications."

Most of the marketing materials that show screen shots of the
UMPC feature views of this application.

There are several components to the Touch Pack. The first one
is "Touch Improvements." This utility makes about 10
different settings changes to Windows such as widening the
scroll bars and enlarging the minimize and maximize buttons,
shows folders in thumbnail view. Next is a new skin for
Windows Media Player called "Brilliant Black." This skin
fills the screen on the devices with large buttons to
navigate the media controls such as play, stop and volume.

The third Touch Pack program is "DialKeys." This program,
built by Fortune Fountain Ltd., is a way to input text with
your thumbs. Dial Keys makes it easy to enter URLs, e-mail
addresses, et cetera.

"DialKeys basically takes a standard QWERTY keyboard layout
and splits it in two halves. It's a little hard to describe
the layout but there are lots of screen shots of DialKeys to
show what it looks like. The basic idea is that you hold the
device in two hands and use your thumbs on the screen to type
in text. It takes a little getting used to, but people are
always amazed once they use it a day or two how good they get
at typing with it," says Hubbard on his blog.

The final product in the Touch Pack is a Sudoku game. The
version is optimized for touch and the pen.

Manufacturing and Cost

UMPCs from Samsung, Asus, and Founder are based on Intel
microprocessors. PaceBlade Japan announced a UMPC, known as
the SmartCaddie, that uses a VIA Technology chip.

Samsung's Q1 went on sale in the second quarter of 2006 with
a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $1,099. Another
UMPC, manufactured by AMtek and available the United States
as the TabletKiosk eo v7110, retails for $899. Asus' and
Founder's UMPC should be available later this year. One
vendor that hasn't announced any UMPC yet is Motion Computing,
although the company sells a variety of tablet PCs in various
shapes and sizes.

"We see it as validation and reinforcement of where we were
headed with tablet PCs," says Bert Haskell of Motion
Computing. "We were drawn into the ultra-mobile tablets by
our customers who wanted a higher level of mobility. It is
nice to see that Microsoft is creating the same type of
vision for a consumer-oriented product."

Motion sells its tablets for the enterprise, and through the
reseller channel, largely aimed at equipping sales forces and
hospital staffs. "We have a significantly different focus in
that we are looking at high-powered enterprise computing,"
says Haskell. Motion sells their tablets with higher-end
components, such as with Pentium M CPUs and 60 GB hard disks
with 1GB of RAM. " We are set up to understand and service
the needs of the enterprise customers. We don't currently
target consumer markets. If and when we decide to make that
transition, it would be a pretty significant change for us,"
he said.

Microsoft has promised that once Vista ships that the UMPC
will be able to run some version of Vista as well, but since
the new OS isn't yet finished it is hard to make any
definitive claims in this area. "The Vista requirements
aren't out yet, but realistically if the units have the
hardware specifications that Vista requires they should be
able to run it," says Microsoft's Hubbard.

Just because the UMPC runs the tablet version of XP doesn't
mean that every tablet-based application is worth running on
it, however. "To be clear though not all tablet-enabled apps
will make sense on a UMPC and not all UMPC apps will make
sense on a traditional tablet," says Hubbard. "The small form
factor and touch interaction of UMPC means that to have
a really great user experience you need to design your UI to
really take advantage of those assets." So chances are if
UMPCs do take off, we will see differentiated applications
over time that take advantage of its touch-screen features
and enhancements that Microsoft is building into the units.

UMPCs overall are expected will cost less than most tablets
and more than most PDAs. It depends on what configurations
the various vendors will initially offer and how they will be
priced in local markets. Price is definitely an issue that
has gotten some analysts going about the new units.

"To me, one of the most important things about this, is
price," stated Bob O'Donnell, program vice president for
clients and displays at IDC. "If it's under $500, it's
a fancy gadget. People spend that much on iPods. So there's
this sense that, at a low price point, it could be very
interesting and very appealing. Think about all the free WiFi
networks that are out there now that you could use this thing
with, and it gives you a full browsing experience as opposed
to trying to browse on a two-inch cell phone, which is
a horrendously useless experience. And yet people are getting
more and more used to having information access almost
anywhere they are, at almost any time."

Scott Fulton of TGDaily.com, sums things up the best about
UMPC's shortcomings: "But what we have instead is something
that's larger than the average pocket, that can't dial out,
that doesn't have a discrete way to connect to the outside
world, is somewhat expensive, and perhaps most unanticipated
of all, is power-hungry."

So what will happen with the UMPC? Only time will tell. If
manufacturers can get several hours of battery life, if the
costs can drop way below $1000, if the touch experience works
out for many new users, and if the right distributors pick up
the products, this could be a winning product for Microsoft
and its OEMs. Hitting all of these targets won't be easy, to
be sure. But there is plenty of interest in UMPC and the size
of the devices is very appealing.