$1200 Dopod U1000 (Athena/Ameo): Everything a UMPC should be?
Right on schedule, Dopod International rolled out its U1000 handtop (known elsewhere as the HTC Athena and T-Mobile Ameo) in Hong Kong and Taiwan yesterday. To commemorate the launch of the device that somehow retails for nearly double that of its $650 European counterpart, Dan Nystedt, a deluded writer at InfoWorld, proclaims that the $1200 U1000 offers far more than a UMPC. In fact, he says, "the device is everything [an] ultramobile PC should be" partly because it has an 8GB hard drive. Um, okay.
Nystedt cites pocketability and mobile-phone usage as examples of how the U1000 trumps standard UMPCs, even though he later goes on to point out how erroneous the comparisons are in the first place. Contradictions aside, however, it’s obviously true that the U1000 is a phone. One with decent battery life, too: 300 hours standby, 5.5 hours GSM talk time, and 4.5 hours 3G talk/Internet time. For multimedia usage, the U1000 is rated at up to 12 hours for listening to music and 8 hours (!) for watching videos.
So fine, the U1000 is "better" than a UMPC because it’s a real phone. But Nystedt’s mention of size does nothing to strengthen his argument. Consider these dimensions: 5.2" x 3.9" x 0.6" (U1000), 5.6" x 3.3" x 1.0" (OQO Model 02), 5.9" x 3.7" x 1.5" (Sony UX series).
[Yahoo! News]
