Tiny Apollo Lake mini PCs are coming soon

Is it a HTPC, UMPC, or tablet? The latest Apollo Lake designs coming from China are hard to classify. (Source: ECDREAM)

Ultra-mobile PCs based on Intel's Apollo Lake SoC are in the works and should start being released soon. These flexible concept PCs will pack the latest generation Celeron processors, touchscreens, and batteries, allowing many use-cases.

Douglas Black, Published 03/11/2017

White box Chinese OEMs and startups have been making ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) for the past couple of years. The designs, such as the Gole1, typically used a low power Cherry Trail Atom chip (like the x5), 32GB eMMC storage, and 2 or 4GB of RAM. Sometimes equipped with touchscreens, they were a bit of an oddity that fell into the category of "because we can". It seems that these concept UMPCs are here to stay for now, as a slew of UMPCs with Apollo Lake and other upgrades will be shipping later this year.

One such device, EC Technology's ECDREAM EC-V26, will pack a quad-core Apollo Lake SoC Celeron N4600 CPU, 8GB of RAM, 128GB eMMC, and even an m.2 slot. This device will also pack a 10,000mAh battery, which should let it be used as a tablet for a few hours (or more if hooked up to a TV). In addition to the usual USB A/C ports and Gigabit ethernet, the EC-V26 will have VGA and HDMI ports to allow it to power dual monitor setups. Also unusual for such a device is the user-upgradable SO-DIMM slot.

The ECDREAM V26 should be out within a month and will sell for around US$450, so if you're interested in finding uses for strange little UMPC devices, keep an eye open.