from Australia's largest technology trade show: EO ultra mobile personal computer

Lia Timson rounds up the coolest gadgets at the latest technology trade show.

                                                                    Tech heads and early adopters must have had a field day at CeBIT, Australia's largest technology trade show. It wrapped up this week, clearing the way for the latest hardware and software to be embraced by consumers and businesses. Some of the gear is already available, other devices will arrive later this year. Much of it capitalises on the trend toward mobile work.

Among the stars of the show was the ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC) - between a tablet PC and a personal digital assistant (PDA) - with full PC capabilities at half of the price of a tablet. The new $1650 EO from TabletKiosk is 50 per cent bigger than the average PDA, runs Windows XP and ditches Pocket PC applications in favour of full Windows software versions.

It's handier and lighter than a tablet or laptop and more useful than a PDA, primarily because of its 17cm touch screen. The UMPC will come with hard drives from 30GB to 160GB, and with memory up to 1GB. It is Wi-Fi and internet enabled, but does not have a mobile phone, although we are told one can be connected via Bluetooth.

Hugo Ortega, the principal of Tegatech Australia , distributors of the EO, says demand has already outstripped initial estimates, with 250 units sold in the first two hours of orders opening. It arrives in June.

"From what we've seen, there is demand for digital ink to take notes on the screen and have it transcribed to Word or other [program]," Ortega says. He says it will finally do away with paper notebooks carried around by students and note-taking professionals.

Samsung and Asus also have ultra-mobile PCs on the way soon.

Still on the portable stakes, a new credit card-size USB flash drive has arrived.

The compact Wallet Flash  has a double-sided USB port that sticks out and is small enough to fit snugly with other cards in your wallet.

Gilad Grinbaum, the director of G-Innovations , distributors of the Israeli-developed device, says it is waterproof, and starts from $30 for 128MB of storage.

If you're a mobile worker in tough and secret conditions, Panasonic's Toughbook CF-51 arrives in September. It is water and shock resistant and comes in a magnesium-alloy case. The 80GB hard drive is removable for security, and fingerprint and smart-card readers are optional. The series was designed to meet US military durability requirements.

Google gives real-time search its own page

Google has a new real-time search page that will allow users to visit a dedicated page when searching for breaking news.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Updated 11:23 a.m. PDT throughout with additional information and background.

Google has changed the way it presents real-time search updates, giving those search results their own section and a "conversation" view designed to cluster like-minded updates.

Back in December, Google first introduced into its search results the concept of "real-time" search results from sources like Twitter and news organizations, placing a dedicated window among regular search results that automatically scrolled through links to stories or tweets related to that topic. It still plans to highlight these types of results among regular search results, but it has created a separate page at google.com/realtime, where those types of updates can be discovered.

The page got off to a rocky start, going down about half an hour after it launched for some users, but Google said it was rolling out gradually to searchers. It can also be accessed from the left-hand side of Google's main search results page under "updates," or directly through a longer URL that Google included in its blog post until the main one reaches everyone.

Real-time search is a thorny problem: it's a lot more difficult to harness the flood of real-time content and organize it in a relevant way than it is to crawl static Web pages. Google actually has to pay real-time sources of information like Twitter for access to the "firehose" of tweets in order to pull them into search results.

Microsoft and Yahoo have also experimented with real-time search: Bing, for example, has a separate page dedicated to "social" results. Startups such as OneRiot have also tried to harness the astounding amount of content produced by social-media users.

As of the first few hours of the new page, Twitter was the main source of content within the search results, although public posts from Facebook, Google Buzz, and other social networking sites like Myspace and Friendfeed showed up in the listings. At the moment, no ads are showing up alongside the results, but it's not hard to imagine that changing should the dedicated page gain traction with searchers.

Searchers can filter the real-time results by geographic location by using the "nearby" link on the left-hand rail, but it needs a little work, surfacing results from Vermont and Mississippi on a search for "obama" filtered to produce results "nearby" the Bay Area.