After a long wait for the Origmi UMPC’s to go on sale in Europe its finally happened. Today I recieved an Easybook P7 from Paceblade for review and testing over the next 3-4 days. Its the first UMPC to be released in Europe.

The Paceblade P7 (click for specs.) is a version of the Amtek 700 which is also being branded by Tablet Kiosk in the U.S. and UK.

Ignoring the battery issues that we know are being investigated, it impressive! I’m also quite suprised at how small it really is. We’ve seen a lot of pictures but it still feels smaller than I imagined. Its responsive too although somehow, fresh windows installs always seem quick until you’ve installed all the extra software you need.

Screen definition is excelent and i’m impressed at how good the non-native resolutions are (800×600, 1024×600.)

Paceblade have added a full-screen keyboard to the software bundle and this should enable more reliable on-screen typing. The touch screen is ‘palm resistant’ which also means you need to touch it with fingernails or the pen. We’ll be ‘living’ with all the input methods over the next three days to see what the advantages of each are.

The orange mouse pointer is nice to use and as a left-handed writer it works out extremely well to have the mouse going in one hand and writing or pointing in the other.

First reaction from my wife was ‘its not that pretty is it.’ which was followed shortly by ‘wow, its a full PC!” My daughter was rather excited too when I showed her Barbie.com in all its flash-enhanced glory!

Over the next few days I’ll be using it in as many situations as possible from the early morning bedside email check to watching digital TV in the garden via a USB stick. I’ll try it out in the car, boot linux, stream music and videos and take a lot of pictures! I’ll also try and work out what it means to the home user and the business user.

Regards
Steve / Chippy.