Porient H12 UMPC (available in bulk now)

Sources:  Engadget;  Pocketables.com

Another release in the vague UMPC/PDA market, this time a successor to a linux machine released last year.  The same company which brought out the H9 UMPC has released a new model called the Porient H12.

This is almost slightly larger than a PDA, and almost a UMPC.  This is a very small unit running on an 520MHz Intel XScale PXA270 CPU, 2GB flash storage with a 4.8-inch monitor with 800×480 pixel resolution, it also has an SD/MMC card slot.  For connectivity it is capable of 802.11b/g Wifi, GPS and DAB / DVB-H / DVB-T tuners. It runs on Linux and has a built-in browser, RSS Reader, MSN, photo viewer and editor, voice recording, email, business card manager, multimedia player, PDF viewer and an office suite, among other things.

It doesn’t have a mouse, keyboard.  It does have mini-USB slot.  The user interface is a the touchscreen monitor.  No word if a pen comes with it for free.  Otherwise, you’d have to buy yourself a pen pointing device or use your fingers instead.  My experience is with touchscreen monitors of this size, and smaller is to use the pen instead.  I get frustrated easily if my fingertip isn’t working.

This product however looks like it won’t be seen in this configuration once released.  There’s no pricing for individual sales.  Which only means that, for now, it’s targeted for bulk sales, and for re-branding.  The Chinese company, Beijing Peace East Technology Development, Inc., looks like it’s positioning this product for export with no distribution channel.

In which case, the support might not be there when you need it.  It could be argued that with Linux onboard, there’s not much software support to call, though.  It’s an iffy proposition, to say the least.  I’d much rather get one from a company with more to lose from a lemon and closer to home, than one which is virtually unknown and half a world away.  But that’s just me.