Chippy, who writes for UMPCPortal.com, has been planning a bike ride across Germany for months. The original start date was delayed due to bad weather, but the Solar UMPC journey finally began on the weekend. But Chippy started his blog a long time ago and up until now, it has charted the extraordinary amount of time he has spent getting ready. It's one thing to manage a camping trip on a bike in the first place—Chippy's trip is even more challenging, since he has rigged his bike with solar panels so that he can blog along the way on a Samsung Q1b UMPC. Chippy's main tour sponsor is VIA; the processor in the Samsung Q1b is a VIA C7-M ULV which gives the device the best battery life of any device in its class.

The fully-fitted bike is 25kg and Chippy manages around 20km/h. So far he's blogged from a beigarten and from inside his tent late at night, a fellow camper's snores bellowing nearby. Although Chippy has experimented before the trip with how well the solar panels work to charge the UMPC, reading about his experiences during the trip will be very interesting. It's ironically kind of primitive—no airplanes, hot indoor showers or an assurance of toilet facilities when you need them—but this is a very modern mobile trip none-the-less!