New EM Mobile UMPC with HSDPA

After the swoopy sleekness of the Nalu concept , this EM Mobile UMPC designed by Sharp for the Japanese market looks dolefully retro. Called the EM ONE, it will be sold by the carrier as an always-connected HSDPA device, but does away with anything so traditional as voice calling. Instead, you can enjoy yourself with the 4.1-inch, 800×480 screen, b and g flavour WiFi when coverage proves lacking, and Bluetooth 1.2, tapping away on the slide-out keyboard or, if words are still too traditional, sliding the unit sideways to access just the D-pad and joystick.

Strangely it relies on Windows Mobile 5, not 6, and the camera is a paltry 1.3-megapixels (paltry by Japanese cellphone standards, certainly).  A 520MHz PXA CPU together with NVidia’s GoForceTM5500 chipset lend some meat to the performance, and although the 4-hour battery life is good when compared to proper UMPCs (e.g. those running the full Windows OS) it’s not great for a WM5 device.

Other confusions include the need for a joystick when the display is a touchscreen, and the lacklustre internal memory when compared to something like the HTC Ameo - the EM ONE has 512MB of flash and 128MB of SDRAM, expandable by miniSD but nowhere near the Ameo’s diddy hard-drive.

Still, one area where the Ameo is bested is the EM ONE’s 1-Seg Mobile TV tuner, which makes the most of the widescreen and built-in stereo speakers.

The EM ONE will be on-sale in Japan at the end of March, at ¥95,000 ($797) without contract or ¥39,800 ($332) if you’re willing to sign up for two years.

Emobile [via Engadget and Akihabara News ]