By the end of Q1, 2007, OQO will launch a tiny, fully powered PC that runs Windows Vista. It’s not an iPhone, but it comes with EVDO wireless, plays music and videos, runs standard desktop applications, has 30Gb or 60Gb of space, a tablet interface, an inbuilt keyboard and runs for 3 or 6 hours depending on which battery you choose. It’s thrice the price of the iPhone, but very compelling in its own right, and much better than the S-XGen that was also launched at CES.

But I use a 12” Tablet PC with a wireless broadband card to do all of my mobile work, and only ever use my mobile phone to connect to things like Gmail or my phone provider’s walled garden of content.

Still, given that the OQO comes with a built-in EVDO modem that should deliver wireless broadband like speeds, if I had one of these, I’d surely use it to check my emails, write short articles and do actual work when out and about instead of pulling out my mobile phone.

After all, I much prefer real desktop apps to the ones we’re forced to use on mobile devices. Of course, the Apple iPhone is set to change this, with another form of desktop class applications on a mobile device.

Nevertheless, until iPhones are in wide use, the OQO model 2 is the world’s smallest ‘real’ portable computer. And as it has an active digitizer, it is compatible with both the older Windows XP Tablet PC edition, and the extensive handwriting/Tablet features that are just built-in to Windows Vista.

So you could easily write my emails and see them incredibly accurately turned into text. Given that Vista has built-in voice recognition technology that is also surprisingly good, you should also be able to just dictate as well, providing you’re in the right environment.

The OQO model 2 is, sadly, three times the price of the iPhone. But actually that may not really be the case. After all, Steve Jobs, in his keynote, explained that the $499 or $599 iPhone (depending on whether you get the 4Gb or 8Gb version) is on a 2 year contract. I wonder if it will be possible to buy the phone without a contract – even though you can only use it on Cingular at this stage. What would the price of the iPhone be then?

Anyway, back to some specs on the OQO model 2. It weighs only a pound, and will fit into a pocket. The processor is either 1.2 of 1.5Ghz, with a claimed six times increase in speed over the OQO model 1, can take up to 1Gb of memory and has a display more than six times brighter than its predecessor.

What else is inside the OQO model 2? Read on to page 2 for the conclusion...