It's got well-known investors; it has loads of buzzwords, including ultra-mobility, WWAN, InfoPane, and Vista. It's the FlipStart "micro PC" from Vulcan. So let's check it out. First, it's small. Damn small. Shots of the Flipper next to my hand and a CD case for scale: It comes with amenities, including a docking station and that much-hyped but little-seen InfoPane technology that's lately supported by Windows: It’s got well-known investors; it has loads of buzzwords, including ultra-mobility, WWAN, InfoPane, and Vista. It’s the FlipStart “micro PC” from Vulcan. So let’s check it out.First, it’s small. Damn small. Shots of the Flipper next to my hand and a CD case for scale:It comes with amenities, including a docking station and that much-hyped but little-seen InfoPane technology that’s lately supported by Windows: InfoPane allows you to check on e-mail, appointments, and contacts if you’re in a work mood, but your FlipStart is closed. Or you can goof off and use it to play music straight out of your My Music collection.It also comes with a long-life battery that basically “stacks” onto the bottom of the case:Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not going to pan it right away. I’ve only had the little munchkin for a day, so a full review seems premature. I’m taking it to InfoWorld’s Editorial Retreat next week, where I’ll be stacking it up against normal-sized notebooks, Sasquatch Venezia’s Toshiba Libretto and hours and hours of meetings. Meanwhile, I am going to point out a few things:1. The keyboard is flat out unusable for work. If all I’m doing with my $2,000 FlipStart money is text messaging, then I suppose it’s OK. But I can’t see taking it to a meeting and keeping accurate notes.2. Why make it so small as to make an optical drive impossible? As you can see from the scale shot, a CD is wider than the FlipStart. But if they’d just made it an inch or so wider, they could have tacked on an optical drive that “stacked” the same way as the battery. Now that would have been cool. 3. 30GB of storage space? My music player has more than that.And aside from cool, it would have made it way easier to use. I haven’t quite figured out Vulcan’s target demographic with this thing, but it does seem like a gadget. Gadget means a large swath of beginner/home users. Without a CD drive, you’re asking those users to figure out how to install software off a home network or a USB drive. Or you’re asking them to drop another $200-plus on an external CD or DVD drive — which Vulcan really should have as a bundling option. You’d have fewer issues with that segment if you just gave them an internal drive. As it is, this thing is a walking advertisement for BitTorrent.There’s more that Vulcan could have done here. Most of which was done in the Flybook, which I wrote on back in January. That box is slightly larger (there’s another Oliver’s Hand comparison shot in that post, so check it if you want to compare), but it’s still small enough to qualify as an ultraportable. It’s got a usable keyboard and also turned into a tablet, which the Flipstart doesn’t.And while both the Flipper and the Flyer have WWAN broadband wireless built-in, only the Flybook takes this as far as it can go — adding the ability to take a SIM card and actually turn the Flybook into a phone and also supporting a GPS service so you can just flip the Flyer open and it’ll tell you where to go. ‘Nuff on this puppy for now. Maybe I’ll find a killer app for it in the next few days. I’m not only going to put it through its paces this week, I’m also going to give most of the InfoWorld staff a crack at it and we’ll arrive at a mass consensus in the upcoming official review. Technology Industry