TabletKiosk announces two new UMPCs

I am a fan of the UMPC platform and am actually on another business trip with my Samsung Q1 as my primary PC. So far it is again proving to be a very capable device, especially now that I have 1GB of RAM installed with the Q1 restored from scratch.

News of a couple new UMPC models comes from the Origami Project site. TabletKiosk is the only other current UMPC brand competing with the Samsung Q1, ASUS and Founder models should be coming soon, and they just announced their second generation i7200 series devices. The 7210 and 7209 differ by processor, RAM, and hard drive capacity. New features on these two models include a 1.3 megapixel camera and integrated 4-in-1 memory card reader. While it is great to see new UMPC devices rolling out, I still think the Samsung Q1 has better multimedia features and is my personal preferred device. I was a bit surprised to see the rather high price of these newer devices, US$1,099 for the 7209 and US$1,399 for the 7210, since the goal of Microsoft was to get these somewhere down in the US$700 range and now these two are more expensive than the current US$899 v7110 models. These new models are expected before the end of August.