Black Diamond Advanced Technology has announced the launch of the SwitchBack-PC, the world’s first rugged Ultra Mobile Personal Computer (UMPC). The SwitchBack-PC is designed to meet military requirements for shock, vibration, dust, moisture and extreme temperatures.

The SwitchBack-PC has a tidy footprint at 7.5″ x 5.5″ x 2″ and weighs in at a slender three pounds, yet packs the power of a traditional desktop into a portable, rugged, handheld solution.

The SwitchBack is designed to meet the demands of users working in the field or in harsh environments. The housing is magnesium reinforced with rubber isolators and shock-mounted electronics. Some of the other key features include:

The first rugged UMPC to have a built-in thumb keyboard.
Up to 60GB removable hard drive.
A 5.6-inch WSVGA sunlight-viewable touchscreen with stylus that can be can be viewed outdoors in all lighting conditions.
Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi b/g and GPS wireless capabilities.

The SwitchBack also …

The Sony VAIO UX Series Micro PC works basically like a regular PC, but smaller. It runs the regular version of Windows XP and the VGN-UX280P pictured here has 40 GB hard drive and an Intel Core Solo Processor at 1.2 GHz and 1 GB of memory (this is the max allowed).

The Sony Micro PC has a keyboard and a touch screen stylus, so you can use either depending on what you are doing with it. The battery runs from 2 to 4 hours and can run up to 9 hours with a larger capacity battery. There is also a port replicator available for the Sony Micro PC so you can dock it and use a full size keyboard and monitor when you would like. The screen size is 4.5″ measured diagonally, and the Micro PC resolution runs up to 1024×600.

For network connectivity, you …

Although I think that a robot shaped like the top one might have been a better choice for White Box Robotics to use for the injection moldings template for their robots, I think the 914 PC-Bot they ended up with is not too bad looking, in a Star Wars kind of way.

The 914 PC-BOT (the one in white) is a 21″ tall XP Home PC with a number of other features and an API to allow you to develop against it for a wide range of custom behaviors to make your bot a little more life-like, such as navigation, speech recognition and some artificial intelligence algorithms.

The White Box 914 runs on batteries to power the two wheel drive train and the Mini-ITX driven PC. IT comes with a Gig of RAM, 40 Gig hard drive, …

The whiny buzzing noise from my old PC just about drove me to insanity. I built my own Shuttle PC from a barebones kit a few years ago. The PC itself has performed flawlessly for years but the noise emanating from this demonic beast started making my eye twitch and eventually got the best of me. I tore the case apart looking for the source of the noise but I never really got the noise down to a satisfactory level. After that horrific experience I have definitely learned to appreciate a quiet PC and vowed to get a quiet PC the next time around.

EndPCNoise.com is a hardware reseller that specializes in building ultra-quiet PCs and parts. They stock a bevy of quiet power supplies, case fans, hard drives, CPU fans, and silent PC cooling solutions. They have a nice selection …