Like many others across the world, I’ve been relaxing over the last three days. I took the family (of UMPCs, along with my wife and kid!) to Holland where we had a lovely relaxing time by the sea. I managed to stay offline for most of the time but its quite difficult when there’s free WiFi access around you! I couldn’t help but at least keep up with my RSS feeds and there’s two topics that I want to briefly report on before I get fully back into the swing of things tomorrow morning. The first has nothing to do with news at the weekend – Microsoft Autoroute, and the second does – Microsoft Sideshow.
Autoroute is fantastic…for co-drivers.
Autoroute (Europe) / Streets & Trips (America) has got to be one of the best value programs around. I don’t ever remember buying a program with as much current, useful information and interactivity in it for such a cheap price. The details on the moving map are great. The points of interest are endless and the fact that it can plan a route between 2 houses in two different places in Europe will never cease to amaze me. On the way to Holland my wife took the wheel which gave me a good chance to play with it and get to know it. Setting it up with a Bluetooth GPS was simple and entering start and end points was a doddle. Turning in the turn-by-turn directions was easy and the full screen option was a pleasure to watch. And all this in the comfort of my two hands. Which is actually the main point I wanted to make. It ant no drivers-aid so don’t ever think that Autoroute is going to be your co-pilot. You definitely need some concentration and a pair of hands to operate it. I’d love to see it integrated into Origami experience for the 2008 version. If they re-designed the OE interface for single finger usage (and ported it to Windows XP) I think I’d be happy to pay $50-$80 dollars for what could make a nice basic in-car setup. In its current version though its just a tool for a passenger or during a service-station stop.
Sideshow. I don’t see an attraction.
Over the weekend there was a video of a sideshow-enabled Samsung Q1 doing the rounds. Jkkmobile then followed-up with positive thoughts about the possibilities. I had to time to think about it and do some research (I confess – I’m no sideshow expert so I had to do some reading) and I’ve currently got a rather negative feeling about it along with a list of thoughts. The way I see it is that Sideshow is there to enable the presentation of simple data either pulled from the sideshow cache or the local storage on a paired device or through a wake-up process that activates, hopefully, only the components required to pull in data from other sources. Its an always-on simple and remote data-display.
What advantage is a sideshow device going to give you over an Ultra Mobile PCs or Mobile Internet Device? Well, instant, always-on viewing of your calendar and recent emails is one thing. Audio playback is another. Document display could be nice along with, maybe a simple image sideshow applications. Cached RSS feeds would be nice. There’s also the advantage that you can do all that with a very long battery life and at a low cost. By adding this feature to a ultra mobile PC hardware you can even utilize some components of the UMPC. You end up with a big sideshow device with a long battery life and huge storage. But how much of an advantage it that? You get to access SOME of your static data and preserve battery life. The problem I have with it is that most of those advantages are already something I have with me all the time, on my cellphone…without me having to buy a Vista-based ultra mobile PC or home PC! And in a few years, the timescale it would take sideshow to get mainstream, a low-end ultra mobile PC or even an x86-based smartphone will have 8 hours battery life instant-on capabilities anyway. It might even have a detachable, persistent, daylight-readable Bluetooth connected screen. Isn’t a PC in my pocket more useful than a bolt-on sub-set of the PocketPC?
Where’s the compelling reason to buy a sideshow enabled device? Where the unique feature that solves a problem or improves efficiency? Its a nice bit of tech for sure but that’s not something that’s going to appeal to everyone or add value to every personal computing device and certainly not the UMPC. Think about these issues:
- Accessing local data requires screen, hard drive and bus in most cases. As the power-envelope of CPUs and chipsets tends towards negligible, the only ultra mobile PC power drain you are left with is the screen, the storage and the radios. If you implemented a slideshow device today, you might see a tangible advantage but in 18 months time, I can’t see there being a massive power-drain advantage in viewing my email through a reduced-size sideshow device over a fully working UMPC.
- Retrieving information from remote home or Internet servers is going to require the use of a radio. Again, minimal advantage over using a UMPC.
- The low-end sideshow devices don’t look like they’ll be able to play any high-end media. I doubt they’ll be able to provide a decent video experience on a 800×480 screen that’s for sure. No Powerpoint presentations, no flash, no plugins.
- Where’s the value of cached RSS feeds when many always-on, always-with-you feature-phones give you a the capability to read cached or even live feeds.
- Where’s the browser? What happens when I click on a URL in an email – do I get a sideshow browser? No. You have to bring your ultra mobile PC out of standby anyway. Whats the switch-over time from sideshow to UMPC?
- Will the gadgets actually be able to use an 800×480 or 1024×600 screen or will someone have to write a new set of gadgets that make use of the full ultra mobile PC screen?
- How are ‘push’ services handled? Always-on radio?
- The N800 Internet tablet will play music for nearly 10 hours. The Q1b with extended battery will also play music for 10 hours but are people buying UMPCs to play music? Will a sideshow device drive sales of UMPCs as music players? No!
- How much will touch-enabled sideshow hardware add to the cost of my mass-market ultra mobile PC or MID? (I saw one report that it could add $100 – that will be too much for a mass-market device.
- If I want an efficient operating system, why should I have to bolt on extra hardware to a desktop system just to make it useable in low-processing power situations? The hardware and operating system need to be tailored for UMPCs. Using sideshow to solve a battery life problem is a botch.
- Why should you have to pay for a Vista license and sideshow hardware just to have an always-on, slim and efficient interface?
- Why should the user be forced to learn a second interface?
- Requires windows vista on ultra mobile PC or home PC (heavyweight, unoptimised, expensive.)
What I do see is that for those that are using the Microsoft environment in every part of their mobile technology (home server, windows smartphone, windows UMPC) it could be nice to have a sideshow device on your mobile phone that can use the UMPC, smartphone or home server when required. In fact, with some development it could a smart-screen device that kills the MID segment! Its going to nice for the fashion market and there could be some possibilities for very low-end branded devices (a flickr camera perhaps?) but with all due respect to jkk, I think he got it wrong this time. What we really need is focus on ultra mobile PC development. Lets bring them to the point where they become the full capability, x86-based, instant-on companion device. I don’t want a sideshow, I want the main attraction!
