A demo device was shown as an example of how hardware manufacturers can utilise the new hardware;

Click here to view the embedded video.

If like me you are interested in this amazing UMPC then check out Craig Pringles blog for a few nice articles on various aspects of the device:

I’m feeling a bit… Shifty

Shift Review Part 1 – a tour

How useful is the HTC Shift?

The HTC Shift Operating Systems

Holy Shift! It does have GPS!

My main concern with this device is the battery life, I don’t think I could survive a normal day with only two hours mobility at my disposal. Its an issue which many people have discussed and hopefully an issue with HTC can resolve or improve on.  

I read James Kendricks post on the performance issues with Vista a few days ago and it got me thinking about a few things. I have never really suffered any real issues with Vista and I think its far better out of the box than any of the other Microsoft operating system, however the mobile arena are having real problems with UMPC’s and lower powered devices and their frustrations are becoming apprent all accross the blogosphere.

I run Vista Ultimate on a AMD Athlon 3400+, 2GB of RAM and a good quality SATA hard drive and as you would expect things run nice and smoothly. I get the occasional screen flicker at boot and the cold start is around 25 seconds longer than that of XP but not enough to damage my productivity at home.

James said:

“If you use Sleep and Resume you quickly fall victim to the dreaded Vista la-la land where the device fails to resume properly. Sometimes the device comes back fine but without a screen which is oh so useful. Other times it comes back but hangs the entire device up in just a few seconds. Both of these situations require a hard boot by turning off the power, which not even the OS likes, and then sitting through a boot time even longer than normal. If you call several minutes to boot normal.”

I can see his point, I wouldnt want to sit for two to three minutes while out on the road waiting for my so called ‘mobile’ device to cold boot because it wouldnt resume correctly.

I think one failing of most of the Microsoft operating systems of past and present is each time a new one is released, its bigger and better. By bigger and better I mean contains more features and security systems which take ‘bigger and better’ hardware to run it correctly and make the user experience a pleasant one. Some of this can be avoided by optimising the OS to the hardware on which it runs but by doing this you end up with an Apple Mac type environment where the OS will only run on approved hardware. We could say bye bye to the hundreds and thousands of hardware vendors that don’t get their hardware approved.

In my opinion perhaps Microsoft would be better taking an OS and making it run on the smallest possible processor with a minimum amount of memory taking a minute space on a hard drive but trying to keep as many features as possible. By doing this they could begin to bridge the gap between mobile devices and full fledged devices, you would end up with the same OS at home, work and on your mobile or PDA. You would not be limited because an application works on one but not the other, they could call it Vista Mobile…

…perhaps not but I certainly think for the sake of the ever growing UMPC sector, some consideration should be taken into making Vista run on less.

Hugo Ortega over at GottaBeMobile.com has been busy reviewing a first product to the UPMC market for HTC Shift and the Fujitsu U1010. Both brilliant in-depth reviews so pop over there and check them out.

I’ve been thinking to myself about a device in this form factor for a while but am having justifying the cost to my wife. Perhaps I can join the ‘Blame JK Venture’ ?

Projects like Microsoft Surface interest me greatly because of the potential for them to completely change the way we work with not just mobiles but laptops, pda’s, UMPC’s (ultra mobile PC’s), remotes, in fact everything we have to touch (or not) to operate. What makes this project even more interesting is the fact Microsoft aren’t the only ones researching and developing these technologies, there is, as always a linux equivilent.
The fact is we are already starting to see improvements in the way we work with our devices, the HTC touch is another extremely clever device which relies a clever new interface that can be operated with one finger. Even current Windows Mobile devices can get better more improved interfaces from people like V2R with SAMs Carousel.

OK the later isn’t groundbreaking but its a step towards a shift in attitude when it comes to interaction with our gadgets and devices.