I was one of the lucky ones who received his eo i72xx series UMPC from TabletKiosk before they indefinitely postponed shipments of the first allocation of machines due to "driver issues."
This is according to this post on September 13th at origamiproject.com's forums.
Thank you for contacting TabletKiosk. We have received your order, however at this moment we have stopped shipping units due to a identified software driver issue. We anticipate we should have this issue resolved within the next 72 hours at which time we will resume shipping these units.
Based on some support requests of my own concerning the video drivers, I believe the driver issue that's holding up shipments is with the Intel graphics drivers. I'll follow this post soon with another detailing my issues.
But as of today (Sept-26), it seems that TabletKiosk still hasn't resumed shipments of the 72xx series models.
As of today (Sept-26) it sounds like TabletKiosk has recently resumed shipments of devices with updated video drivers. A couple people with order numbers at or above ~1000 have either received their machines with updated drivers or received notice of shipment (cite).
While people wait to get these machines I'll feed the interests of others by reporting that despite the varied issues I've had (posts forthcoming on these), I still love my eo. I'm using it all the time in lots of different places. Here's a list of things I'm using it for now.
Watching TV shows I've recorded.
We have a little boy who happens to go to bed right in the timeslot of the few TV shows we like. So I record them via the video capture card on my Mac and my wife an I watch them later in the evening on the eo. For some reason this it's more enjoyable to snuggle up on the couch and watch via this tiny piece of technology than for to record shows on VHS and watch them on the big screen TV. We'll see if this odd behavior of ours passes as the novelty of the eo wears off.
OneNote
I've installed a copy of OneNote 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh and boy is it cool. All I'll say is that this is saving me from keeping lots of little scraps of paper lying around. We're in the process of building a house and having a tablet and OneNote months ago would have been an awesome way to manage all the decisions and correspondence. Regardless, OneNote's open most of the time, using it to record phone calls/coversations, take meeting notes, and collect research for various "projects," and manage our shopping list all the while sharing notebooks with my other Windows box so that I can get at this information from multiple machines. I like this tool.
GPS + mapping
I bought a copy of DeLorme's Street Atlas 2006 earlier this summer in anticipation of getting a UMPC.
I also just bought a Holux GPSlim 236 bluetooth GPS receiver on ebay. This is a very nice GPS receiver using the SiRF III chipset which allows it to get a satellite lock very quickly and even in poor overhead cover (inside, under trees, next to buildings. I paired it with the eo very easily and it seems to work with any app that uses NMEA 2.3 protocol over a serial port. Plus I can recharge it's battery via a USB A-to-mini-B cable right off of the UMPC.
Short story (more on this later) is that Street Atlas 2006 and the Holux receiver work great together and I was able to find some outof the way shops easily on arecent trip out of town using them.
Wardriving
Just for kicks, I installed Netstumbler 0.4 and used it and the Holux GPS receiver to find tons of access points around the small town I live in. I won't say this is a new hobby for me, but it is very interesting to see how popular 802.11b is now; and how many suckers are running unsecured access points. Too bad only a couple of them are actually open for free public use.
Portable Music Library
My collection of music and audio books recently outgrew the 18GB limit on my Creative Zen Touch player. Now I'm using up about 1/3 of the dinky 60GB drive on the eo for my collection. But at least I don't have to define special filters to decide what I'm going to keep on the media player I use in my truck.
Browsing/Emailing/IMing from all over my property
Yes, I have used the eo from the toilet. Ewwwww.
There are a lot more fun things I've been doing with it. Stay tuned.
For those still waiting for your eo i72xx series orders to be fulfilled, hang in there.
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Hello, I'm quite interested
Hello,
I'm quite interested in the i7210 but have been holding off on news of the 2nd generation UMPCs to start rolling out near the end of the year. I've e-mailed Dennis Rice with some questions about this unit also and I asked specifically about the processing, as it is not dual core and only 1 GHz. Are you still able to run multiple applications without slowing things down too much?
Dennis also mentioned that the inking is not up to par with slates or tablets. How is your inking experience? I know there is a learning curve but once you break that barrier are you able to take notes and do other inking without any registration from your hand?
The asthetic look of this device has always attracted me as I do not like the glossiness of the Samsung Q1, although their media software is getting good praise. Have you considered a USB TV tuner for the umpc? I'd like to know how this would fair, although the thought of holding it with a coax cable attached is not too exciting, docking the device for watching TV or leaving it to record shows to watch later would be nice.
The power of these things is
The power of these things is more than enough to run multiple applications. I have regularly had Thunderbird, Firefox, OneNote, DeLorme Street Atlas 2006 all running simultaneously just fine along with all the apps that are needed to manage the touchscreen, bluetooth, wifi, ...
Whether they're powerful enough all depends on your expectations. One of the two machines I use most of the time, at least prior to getting the eo, is a laptop that's 4 years old now, has a 4300 RPM, a 1.2GHz Athlon CPU and 512MB memory. I don't do any gaming. But I can do software development and watch video on it along with all the other mundane stuff I do.
As far as inking, the issue is that the screens are touch screens and not active digitizers. This means that you can use anything to register a touch on the screen, a stylus, your finger, your palm. If you rest your hand on your writing surfaces, then a UMPC might pick up that touch as input and wreak havoc on your handwriting. An active digitizer uses a special stylus to register a touch and will not treat the placing of your hand on the surface as an input. But you can't use your finger to drive the interface; you must always have a special stylus handy. Some units have heavier touchscreens (such as the TabletKiosk eo 7110 which is a 120gm screen). This means that they require a much more dedicated push to register a touch. Therefore, they don't treat your hand lightly resting on the display as an input as easily as some other models. Hugo Ortega has a video demonstrating this when comparing the eo 7110 to the Samsung Q1.
I haven't considered a TV tuner/capture card. I have one on my Dual CPU PowerMac G5 and I honestly think that unless the card is doing all the encoding, today's class of UMPC is a bit resource limited to beable to encode and record the video at decent resolutions. Plus I'm not interested in connecting any more than I have to to the outside of my eo. It's my portable, go everywhere system.
I'm sad! I cannot find one
I'm sad! I cannot find one for me in all the USA! Tabletkiosk said the i7210 will arrived next week, but since a month everyweeks,said: "Next week!" Can someone find one for me?