All Gadgets Aside...

Whatever you wanna call it, it falls into the category that I really hold a place for in my heart. I am big fan of all things that are more portable than a laptop but larger than a pda. There really is a happy medium for a "truly portable" device, this device may have hit that happy medium on the head.

The Kohjinsha SA1F00 is one of the devices that is nice and small but it has the capabilities to do anything a regular computer can(ok maybe not play top of the line games, but you understand). What really makes this stand out above and beyond is the fact that A. it has a nice price range, $750 for one with 40gb of HD space or $930 for one with an 80gb HD and Office installed. and B. because it so portable yet it has all the same aspects as a standard laptop, wifi, bluetooth, up to 1gb of ram, 5 hours of battery life. This portable wonder packs a 533mhz AMD Geode processor, which may not sound like much but for a device like this it's more than plenty. Now only if I could ditch the OS for a flavor of linux it would be great in my book(it comes standard with Windows XP). I think though that I will have to stick with my favorite portable computer of choice, the Nokia 770, oh the touch screeny goodness.

I figured I had to post about this as I had been pondering this over the past few days. I know Microsoft has more or less invented a new category of computer, but the question is, Have they? I mean if you look back at the history of handheld portable gadgets you can see numerous amounts of devices that do much of what these "new" handheld computers do. Don't get me wrong here, I think a small, portable, easy to use computer is as good as the next guy imagines it is. The thing is that it begins to bug me when a company thinks they are on the tip of innovation with a device when what they are doing has allready been done.

I would say one of the first similar devices came in the form of the Apple Newton 2000 and 2100. They were fast, they were portable, they were small but not too small. If you wanted to add more space you could via the PCMCIA slot and heck even to this day people are still using them on a daily basis. Even beyond that though the more current PDA offerings are much more like full featured computers. Wifi, bluetooth, hordes of applications and programs and not to mention the fact that some even have hard drives in them now. Then we look at the OQO, a true ULTRA MOBILE Personal computer. This device was being worked on for so long before its release that the company may have signed the devices death warrant before release but in the end it is an incredible device that seems to be picking up speed. Then we move on to the Pepper Pad, a fabulous linux handheld that oddly enough sports a similar keyboard layout to the UMPC offerings that are coming out now, granted its not on the screen, but its there.

All in all there is history behind the concept and the idea of having something that is so simple it doesnt need to have a huge keyboard. Something that can be used in and out of the house and be carried with you everywhere.