I conducted my daily glance over of the engadget website, and I bumped into this…

…the extremely poorly named Wibrain B1 UMPC. Nope, I am not kidding, thats really the name, and it is almost as bad as the Nintendo Wii.

But whats in a name?

Say I wanted a UMPC, which I do, if it had instant on and enough battery life to use all day. This does not provide for those two, but lets pretend that those are not criteria for this discussion as no UMPC that runs Windows at the moment really offers that so far as I know.

The B1 has a split keyboard design similar to the Samsung UMPC, and a form factor that should be easy to recognize if you grew up in the days of the Sega Nomad, Gamegear, or Gameboy advance. The B1 even provides a nifty flip out web cam that is built in. In the demo videos from Dynamism it is even shown playing Quake 2, which makes me wonder if it can play Half Life 1… and in turn the original counter-strike.

Oh as_oilrig… now I miss thee.

Many people who responded in the comments sections of websites featuring it declared it ugly, confusing, or undesirable…. but I just don’t pick that up from it. I would keep that thing in my pocket all day and use the bollocks out of it… and I quite like the utilitarian looks of it. Sure the iPhone and Nokia N810 are beautiful, but this makes me think “functional”.

Speaking of functional, this would be a great platform for a ruggedized treatment…. something along the lines of a Panasonic Toughbook.

Can I tell you why I find this more appealing than most UMPCs? No, sorry…. but I promise to tell you if I can figure it out. Its priced at about 700 bucks for the cheapest model on Dynamism, and features a 1.2 ghz VIA processor, 512 to a gig of ram, 30 to 60 gigs of storage space, and a 4.8 1280 by 600 pixel screen touchscreen display. By a few accounts I have read, the keyboard is designed to provide a good tactile feedback, a difficult to achieve but essential feature for any keyboard.

The only UMPC I find more appealing is the second version of the OQO, which boast 1 .6 ghz processors 3g network access a smaller form factor, and a more established support system. Bear in mind though, that this device costs twice as much as the Wibrain B1.

Despite my current drooling over UMPCs, I still feel that mobile internet devices achieve a more useful balance of mobility and features.

- The Digital Kitty

… but its not what you may think.

I was thinking about two things the other night about the Ipod Touch. First, it has no remote, so every time you want to change your song or volume, you have to pull it out of your pocket and unlock it… slightly annoying for such a slippery and fragile device. Second, for some people, 8gb of storage is just far too little.

So I offer a different solution.

The iPhone. No, not as a phone, sine as I have said, it sucks as a phone. I want an iPhone with a data only plan. I want it for Internet access… 3g would be preferable, because of a few things.

First, you would not need a large storage capacity. You could just keep all of your files on your server at home, and access them over your data connection. No more syncing, ever. Streaming radio. HUGE cheap storage. No moving parts.

Next, you will have all of the features that were stripped out of the Ipod touch for no technical reason.

Finally though, you have bluetooth! You can hack it and use it as a tethered modem to your laptop, and you could use bluetooth headphones and some sort of blue tooth remote… I don’t know if it exists, but it would not be hard to make one.

So there. Problem solved. Iphone… data only, and a real cellular phone.

-The Digital Kitty