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Am I the only one who actually wants one and would use it? Except the probably lousy battery life I love the idea.

Have one of these at home. It ran Win 8.1 fast and Win 7 even faster. Even had it running Mac OS X 10.6 as a portable 'mac' for fun, and everything worked, even the graphics. I had the extended battery and my HDD is still working. Its not used anymore but runs better than you'd think for a 32 bit single core CPU.

I have a fully functioning one of these, running Windows 7, which I've upgraded to SSD. I absolutely love this thing, and wish they still made it with current components. I paid almost 3K for mine :)

As a sysadmin, I would have loved having one of these with an ethernet port back in the day.

Now put it back together

I can appreciate the engineering that went into this!

that was one of the best PC i had in that time, it ran windows vista without any problem, touch screen, GSM, Bluetooth, WiFi, fingerprint, dual camera. the keyboard worked perfectly. believe me, when you had that vs a pocket pc with windows mobile the vaio was superior x 100 times, but today is old..

What a beautiful little gadget, just imagine a full blown PC in the palm of your hand back in the day. I'd say this thing was WAY ahead of its time the technology was just not there, of-course nowadays you can get a quad-core Intel Atom tablet with 2gigs of RAM a 64GB ssd with Windows 10 at a throwaway price. But with that tiny screen and XP or Vista on it.. nah.

I've heard some people actually replaced the CPU on this with a legit Core 2 Duo mobile, which would make this the most powerful UMPC in this screen size category, to date.

I want one of these so bad it's like the dopest thing I've ever seen

The chipset is usually bigger than the cpu as it uses the process node from the step before (and allows them to use those foundries after they stop making CPUs)

One of my old roommates had one of these. He got it from our state surplus office, where they sell old equipment. He said that these were pretty popular for a while for applications like mobile insurance adjusters. These allowed them to go to scenes, take photos, and file reports on incidents pretty quickly. If you have one that's not been torn into pieces, you can actually make it do a surprising amount of work.

Total teardown. A lot of work went into making that PC.

amazing piece of engineering. full fledged PC in that thing. we didn't have 1GB ram and that storage for more 5 years. phones still are only 32GB commonly. The Intel processors at that time were notoriously hot and power hungry. Even 2 Hours of battery is not bad for it at that time. even full fledged "portable all day" laptops couldn't pull more than 3 at that time

Thanks for this teardown Dave. I have a Samsung Q1 Ultra UMPC, it's a bit bigger, 7" resistive touch screen + stylus, 600MHz Intel Atom, 1GB RAM, and does 8 hours on the battery. It has half of the keyboard either side of the screen and tactile response is pretty good, but the keys are tiny. It fortunately comes with external USB keyboard and a case which acts as a stand. Also has an analogue thumb stick on the left and corresponding d-pad on the right which makes it great for video game emulators. Runs pretty slow on Win XP Tablet Edition though.

This thing eas ahead of its time.. Beautiful still have mine.

I for one really like Sony industrial design

its kind of impressive how many features they crammed in there. Its amazing it even made it to market in this form

Cingular was bought by AT&T in the early-mid 2000s if I recall. Lots of people wanted a small computer - enough that plenty of models were and still are being made in some cases: Samsung Q1 series OQO series Sony Vaio UX series Sony Vaio P series Toshiba Libretto series Viliv S / N series Some Panasonic ToughBooks It's quite difficult to cool such small computers - you either choose between processing power or having a fan, and many opted for the fan. These were meant to run Windows, not walk it. >1GB >Just barely enough for Windows XP The requirement was only 64MB according to the box, 128MB recommended. I'd have to say its unusable unless 256MB or more, which puts this squarely in the acceptable bracket. The Sony Vaio UX was notable for the fact you could (not easily) change the CPU by using a heat lamp to remove it and add a better model. I believe you could add up to a Core2 Duo, but I could be wrong. Don't worry, its not this badly constructed - it's just broken to hell and back by the looks of it. >Expecting tactile feedback from the keyboard of a UMPC Come on you're smarter than that, Dave!

That's a sweet machine actually. The specs are pretty close to those 10.1" Atom N270 netbooks. You should be able watch RU-vid videos at 480p and play Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

I remember seeing the display units for these little beauties at Best Buy... Time flies...

A flop or not I love the build of the internals. They packed quite a bit in there!

21:40 so amazing the hours of work that went into designing that from the first stages, until manufacturing, to it's long life, and all that to eventually end up in parts on Daves desk so we can admire it :) It's funny too how literally all of it was dug up from the earth. Humans are the ultimate recyclers!

I've ALAWAYS wanted to see inside a UMPC, but I've never found one. You really made my day, Thanks David!

Using your own words Dave, "Dead as a dead dingo's dongo". Thanks for the vid.

I love my VGN UX, it was sooo much 1337er than those pleb-smartphones! A shame that they stopped the development of these micro-PCs.

Dave, That CPU from Intel at that point of time had a higher TDP wattage and you can not design a fan-less cooling solution thermal design for that form factor.

I think that computer was showcased in one of the James Bond movies, one of the ones with the current guy.

I would LOVE to have one of these, I have a lot of computers and laptops and phones as well but still, I want one of these!

Things like this Sony Vaio were much ahead of their time, and there were just no software for it. As a ham radio enthusiast, I tried micro Windows PCs several times, and the UI experience was always awful. 99.9% of apps were designed for mouse and were completely unusable with a touch screen, there were no scalable fonts, and so on. In 2006 there was just no software, designed for 4.5" screen, so I can imagine a disappointment of people who bought this for 3K$... And, surprisingly, today Vaio UX is a sort of rarity, and cost a lot, more than many modern laptops :)

Don't know what you're talking about - after watching the first 1 1/2 minutes this device looks pretty cool to me... (although i never heard of it before)

Awww the good old day were the CPU was using less power than the I/O bridge, lovely.

A lot of UMPCs were running low tier BGA Celerons and Pentiums (for the premium units), and the run of the mill were Atom, like netbooks. It was uncommon, some were also equipped with Core Solos. Mediocre performance at best. Today's embedded solutions could certainly handle an OS as hefty as Windows, but these units were almost just a novelty.

Try getting your hands on an Oqo, they are even more tightly packed :)

Intel chips of the time were notoriously (and hilariously) power-hungry and hot. AMD had a big head start on variable frequency scaling and thermal envelope management. I had an even older (486SX!) Fujitsu Point 510 tablet, similar battery life situation even with monster NiCd cells. ARM, of course, has pretty much always won on performance per watt and resulting thermals for embedded solutions, but as Microsoft's efforts demonstrated, both at the time and since (Surface RT fiasco) modern, general purpose OSes weren't quite up to par until Apple got in that game.

I've used the ICS chips before, it is almost definitely a clock generator. It's harder to find information about their older products since they got bought out by IDT. Plus, with a name like "ICS" they were never very Googleable. "You're looking for ICs? Of course you are!"

At 1:15 you mention that Sony Memory Stick is dead. Not quite true. The Sony Memory Stick isn't dead yet. I use the Sony 32 Gbyte Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX high speed (MSHX32B/M) with my full frame Sony a7 mirrorless e-mount camera. From my experience it is very very reliable (Made in Japan). It writes 50 MBytes/second which is great for burst shooting and high bitrate video. However it is very expensive 60€. It is still available new everywhere. At the price of four times bigger 128 GBytes SD. But quality and reliability isn't. You get what you paid. The Sony ultraportable UX series was a dream machine ten years ago. However the Asus EEE first netbook appeared a little later at a fraction of money. Very small and highly expensive ultraportable PCs from Sony and Toshiba wasn't admired so much afterwards.

One of the jobs I had we were on call sometimes and the company had something similar to this with cellular internet built in. These were right before net top things came to market, wifi wasn't everywhere, regular laptops were still big and heavy and we didn't all have smartphones. So it actually came in handy being able to load up the company ticket system or log into a server anywhere.

what a bueatiful little machine. a relic of a entirely different time.

The chopped mic. Someone was in the drug business :D

XP can quite easily run on 1GB of ram Its Vista that really struggles while XP is quite happy with 1GB of ram.

you're bs. I totally wanted this micro PC back in the day. Sony continued to build micro PC's even after this one.

1gb for windows xp is huge. These are the requirements: The minimum hardware requirements for Windows XP Home Edition are: •Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended) •At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended) •At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk.

1. everyone wanted one of those - but it was super expensive 2. try to cool a x86 processor passivly in a ultra mobile nice video!

The Sony "Motion eye" AKA Sony Vaio UX180P was a decent machine for field work/dispatch. I sold a ton of these to a field service company with a custom XP app to keep track of dispatches, inventory, record keeping, invoicing. At the time 2005ish there was not much around hand hold wise. These had cell modems cameras, touch screen and were fairly responsive. This single unit allowed the field agent to document images of everything before starting work, scan parts, get authorization signatures, document images after work, and then everything was automaticaly updated at dispatch. Nice units in all, but I agree the keyboards were dog snot.

OMG Dave, thanks! I love old stuff like this. Gut it and put a pi3 in it with a little daq board. Battery life: 6 days! My bet is the h8 did just about everything in that thing but the Windows. Like the video controller in cellphones that does most of the work until you load an app and the CPU gets involved.

I actually really like the design haha.

That has more features than many full size PC's today. May not be ergonomic but wow for 2006.

The micro could be a keyboard controller. The intel ICH9 south bridge does not have a keyboard controller and would require something to decode the keyboard signals, which the micro with so many IO pins seems to fit well. Also, I suspect someone has tried to take this machine apart before, which is why the mic cable is cut and the connector pads to the bluetooth module is missing...

uCs are very common in laptops and such. they are usually used for logic to control the voltage regulators, sensors and other low level stuff. Louis Rossmann talks about the Mac use of them in his videos a lot.

That sim card is giving me flashbacks of Need for speed most wanted ads on the PS2. God bless product placment

The unit is a "parts bin" of broken parts. It clearly has been thrown around, and that explains why the Bluetooth-module connector is ripped off and missing.

I jist realized something.... this is the first smartphone! dual camera, keyboard, decent prosseser, bt, ethenet, WiFi, Internet access. Sim card and more.

I used to own the Sony Vaio U810 (the convertible laptop version of this device) back in 2008, it had a better half-chiclet keyboard and touchscreen display. It was actually quite usable at the time, even upgradable to Vista :D You can get a dock for the expansion port with several USB ports, VGA, ethernet, audio and power, or a little dongle with just ethernet and VGA.

I would suspect installing a solid state drive and make that a Linux portable platform would just rock, dock it use a bigger screen and mouse keyboard combo. Htpc.

Cingular was actually going to be the only provider the iPhone would work on, right up until the iPhone's release when AT&T bought them

i regret getting rid of mine... :(

For intel processors you should search the S Code: SL9LC and it will tell you what processor. Much easier :)

Thanks ARM for saving us of such crap of Intel technology agenda.

looks quite good to me. double camera nice screen and form factor. u no nice Dave.

The Mailbag letter explained this had been used as a parts donor, so it had obviously been torn apart before, hence all the broken stuff.

Cingular wireless was a mobile phone provider that went through many changes. It started as bell south mobility, then cingular wireless, at&t mobility and finally now at&t wireless. Oh and btw that extra antenna was for cellular internet.

To think in 2009 I was using an MSI U100 Wind Netbook with an even slower Intel Atom N270 as a home/school laptop. RU-vid used to lag unless I had it in full screen, most flash games would lag, but it ran GTA SA on low settings. I even remember running Windows 7 HE in a Virtual Box VM on the thing.

it's also had a pen for the touch screen it was a resistances touch screen

I wanted one of these sooo bad after I got my OQO 01, Shame phones, netbooks, and tablets killed off the UMPC form factor.

Cingular was a cell provider bought out by AT&T not long after this thing was made.

I had an OQO Computer like this and it was not to bad for it's day with just being able to play world of warcraft and a few other games on the GMA graphics.

In 2005-6 there was a horrible siege of Windows CE laptops, with ARM CPUs (mainly xscale). Intel was not commonly seen in small comouter devices, so i think this computer was state of the art in processing power in its time.

I'd still love to have one of these just to throw in the collection, for the pure novelty of it. I remember seeing this at a SONY Store and just it blowing my mind over how compact it was. I think it was something like $1400 back then.

lots of people wanted the design. Not many wanted to spend upwards of $2K for it though.

13:00 This micro control keyboard and all status lights and also loads BIOS and controls power management by means on switching DC/DC converters. it's common in laptops.

For those looking for UMPCs today: the Pyra or the GPD WIN might interest you.

protip, ALL intel x86 parts after the p3 should have S-spec numbers like the SL9LC seen here, thats all you need to look up cpu's and chipsets most of the time.

UMPC Ultra Mobile* Personal Computer. The UMPC era was amazing IMO, some of the quirkiest computer designs ever. Nowadays its all minimal rectangles and boxes.

The GSM antenna "connector" in the back is not a connector. It's a sliding contact for the swivelling antenna, which has been ripped off.

This has Sony and Microsoft in it, a rare sight

Nice vid Dave, loved hearing your thoughts at the end about how the engineering took place.

I knew a stock broker who owned two (maybe three) of these and would use the WWAN feature to work while traveling. I specifically recall his complaints about battery life and the keyboard.

I can understand chopping the wires to the microphone on your computer, it goes along with placing tape on the front facing camera.

hey, about that 16bit MC, it is not a surprise at all, such a controller or similar (or a specialized one, sometimes not programmable) is in EVERY laptop/computer motherboard, usually it is called keyboard controller or embedded controller. Keyboard lines connect to it, also mouse, it also controls the power sequence and power states (sleep, etc), fan speed, leds, backlight brightness, the power button also goes to it, and so on. It connects with the southbridge (you called it IO) through LPC bus.

I am still using a 10 year old Sony Memory Stick in my 10 year old Sony DSC P200. Transfering images to my PC is surprisingly fast for such an memory stick.

Honestly, I would of LOVED to have one of those when they were new. This was really their answer to the BlackBerry. A one up. "Oh, you can do multimedia and have a keyboard? How about we put A WHOLE PC IN THIS! bam!

what a fantastic computer

Hmm, funny. I had that hard-drive in my iPod 5G, the WiFi card and the chipset in my laptop. What a weird concoction of technology. No wonder it ran so hot. The fun thing about those old CPUs, is that the chipset used more power than the CPU

These were very useful in the datacenter before smartphones actually came along and got useful.

I wanted one of these so bad back them. Glad I didn't get one. The death knell for these devices was that the Chromebook came out shortly after this was released.

That looks quite handy to use while travel if it wasn't with the weak battery.

I have one of these, I found it in a council cleanup. It does work, I power it up every now and then to keep it and the battery working. Running Win XP. Mine doesn't have the GSM modem though.

Each time you find something bizare or missing I'm like "well, somebody had allready cracked it open and was a bit destructive about it" :p

+EEVblog 8:55 Yes, in part. The CPU (Core Solo U1x00) alone had a TDP of 6W's, then throw in the ICH and everything else and it doesn't look pretty. Not even talking about the display, or the hard drive (3.3V0.5A) and so on. Looking at modern SoC's with eMMC NAND and you can accomplish similar specs with a heck of a lot less power consumption. Edit: Well, I guess the actual problem was trying to run x86 in this form factor back in 2006/2007. 2014-2016 not a problem but back then? Ehhh..

Cingular was a US cellular provider which was bought out by AT&T.

Looks like a nice pc, None of this "Tablet android" or "Windows Tablet" ball crap, more like mobile desktop with physical buttons & Windows xp! I like it :P

An interesting piece.

This type of computer is known as an Ultra Mobile PC in the US.

The micro is most likely the SMC to the intel processor.

I remember when these were announced and I really wanted one. Never got one, I think I was in middle school at the time, so I wasn't exactly the target market and didn't have anywhere near enough money.

The problem with this, I reckon, is that is was ahead of its time. If they'd rebuild it with modern Atom etc. processors and eMMC storage, the battery would have lasted a day.

Something like the Asus T100HA might be an option for those who want a fun mini machine like this with modern specs.

The processor in this thing was alright, definitely better than Intel Atom which came out few years later. The reason for bad battery life was probably not just the processor, but the graphics ship. They were built with an ancient process and had little to none power saving options

I'd still like a portable computer like that with a real keyboard. I wonder if it would be doable with mSATA SSD and some mobile processor. But in todays tablet world, it would most probably be a DIY project.