HTC Shift….go ahead and drop the f

With battery life nail in the coffin confirmation from Chippy’s live blogging coverage of the HTC press conference today, it seems certain that HTC is poised to fulfill Jenn’s worst nightmare prediction about how it’s initial UMPC offering could be remembered in the mobile computing community. Two hour battery life on Vista is as Thomas Ricker so accurately describes it over at Engadget: “generation-one UMPC pathetic”. In fact, the date on the post from Jenn at pocketables.net I link to above is dated 3/26/2007, when HTC first unveiled the Shift. That was almost a year to the day after I thrillingly received my Tabletkiosk eo only to discover how pitiful the battery life was (90 minutes with wifi), which prompted a return of the device for a full refund (as Tabletkiosk to their credit made quickly possible).

Chippy contends that the Shift is indeed efficient at power drain, but the problem is the capacity of the battery, and therefore the overall form factor – the biggest selling point of the device to begin with. Whatever the case, for them to be so tantalizingly close to mastering the UMPC equation makes it all the more frustrating that they’re just as close to releasing their own Folly of a device as Palm was…….