Digital Cube’s G43: UMPC with super-compact screen

Digital Cube have made good on their promise to shrink down their first UMPC to the market from the over-sized booth model, and the result - called the G43 - is a dinky delight.  You’ll need decent eyes, though; rather than the typical 7-inch display commonly found on its UMPC brethren the G43 goes for a squint-tastic 4.3-inch, 800 x 480 touch screen. 

Inside, we knew it was an AMD Geode CPU and it turns out to be an LX800/900 running at 500MHz; that’s backed up with WiFi in ‘b’ and ‘g’ flavours, Bluetooth, either 30GB or 60GB of hard-drive space, innovative touch-pad for mousing on the right side, USB and a speaker-dock.

The pared back processor will limit it to XP or Linux - not Vista - but to my mind that won’t be the limiting factor.  It’s that screen, falling in-between PDA and typical UMPC, that will make using XP Tablet Edition’s (surprisingly accurate) handwriting recognition features cramped and difficult.  It’ll be interesting to see a comparative review between the G43 and the HTC Ameo.

Hands-on with Digital Cube’s “World’s Smallest” UMPC: the G43 [Engadget]