I’ve used HSDPA mobile broadband technology before and I have to say, this is one technology that I have high hopes for. The ability to surf the internet as long as you have a mobile signal is a great boon for laptop warriors like myself who need access to the internet constantly. At present, the only way you can use HSDPA broadband is by connecting an HSDPA phone to a laptop or buying one of those expensive HSDPA modems.

But this will soon change with Ericsson’s announcement to include high-speed HSDPA technology in future next gen laptops from Dell.

Dell announced that beginning the second quarter of 2008, and will be the second major company to use Ericsson’s technology. Lenovo has earlier announced that it will use Ericsson’s technology. One cool thing about the Ericsson tech is that a GPS component is going to be built into the modules, which means location services is bundled with the tech.

Another UMPC has been spotted in the market. The Astone UMPC looks to battle it out with the leader ASUS with its quite formidable specs.

The Astone UMPC also features a 7-inch screen that can display up to 600 x 480. The machine depends on VIA components. Its processor is a VIA C7-M that is rated at between 1.5 to 2ghz speed. Default RAM is 1gb, and the hard drive capacity is a whopping 30GB — compare that to the ASUS’ 8gb SSD feature. The Astone UMPC ships without an OS, so it’s up to you what kind of OS you want to use.

The Astone, which is priced similarly to the ASUS EEE, has what it takes to threaten ASUS’ dominance in the UMPC market.

After delaying the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 because of a bug, Microsoft finally released it again thinking that they’ve ironed out all of its troubles. Apparently, SP3 related problems are still there and this time the result is far more troublesome.

According to some Windows XP users who upgraded to SP3, they have suffered an endless reboot cycle upon installing the update. The problem seems to confine itself to AMD based PCs, but some Intel users have also complained about the same problem.

There are some experts who say that SP3 is not the problem per se. But let’s see how fast Microsoft can solve this bug. As for me, I’ll wait a couple more months before I attempt to upgrade my OS with the SP3 update.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is now available again after it was delayed because of issues found with users who have Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System in their computers.

According to Microsoft, the one-file update is 316.4 MB. They are recommending that those who only need to update one computer should just consider using Windows Update as it will be smaller there.

Going back to the bug with DRMS, a hotfix has been released to fix the error and it is recommended that the hotfix is applied before updating to SP3. The funny thing here is that when you click on the hotfix, you get a 404 error, which means that the hotfix is not there. Hopefully, this error has been rectified by the time you read this.

Laptop users in North America are quite lucky. ASUS has confirmed that major retailers across the country are now accepting preorders for its forthcoming second generation ASUS EEE, the PC 900. The product will officially be sold on May 12 and users can have a choice of getting a Linux or Windows XP “variants”. The new price point for these babies are at $549, although those who will get Windows will have to contend with a smaller hard drive because of the higher cost of getting a Windows user license.

For those who haven’t yet read any of the references to the EEE PC 900 in this blog, the new unit will have a largers 8.9 inch screen and 1 gigabyte of memory.