A sad moment and one I tried to stop. Origamiproject.com, along with all our links, tips and content, is gone forever.

I had a number of emails with people at Microsoft to try and get the content moved somewhere else but it seems that they simply wanted to remove it from their portfolio. Spam management won’t have helped the situation but I’m wondering if they wanted to remove it from their history too.

Along with UMPC.com (which Intel let lapse into a spam-fest and then into the hands of someone that’s obviously waiting for a re-sale; We tried to secure that domain too!) it was an important part of the online history of the UMPC that has faded away along with many of the other blogs that were around in 2006.

Another UMPC-related site that is closing its doors to consumers is BuildYourUMPC.com. These guys were very active in promoting the UMPC in the early days and I remember the effort they put into a good set of overview videos. We heard today that BuildYourUMPC will be focusing on commercial projects in the near future and that the current site will be switched off soon. They have some stock left though so check it for bargains.

It’s a sad day for UMPC’s but the future is looking better. This month has been one of the best months in a long long time for UMPCPortal. More products, more buzz, more advertisers and more enquiries than ever before so we have no problem with carrying the flag. We can see the light, people!

Origami Experience 2, or OX2 as Origami Project calls it, is the second version of Microsoft’s touch orientated software for UMPCs, and if you can’t wait for its release, swing by the Windows Vista Experience blog for a preview of OX2’s RSS features.

The RSS reader in OX2 allows for easy subscriptions to RSS feeds from any site. Your feed list across IE and the Origami reader will be common. So if you subscribe to something in IE it will also appear in your OX2 feed list, and vice-versa. Podcasts and videos can be played right inside the RSS reader, and you can access the original site through the OX2 internet app (essentially IE with a touch optimized skin over it). The nice part about this is that you are still within the OX2 software, you aren’t just using it as a software launcher like the first iteration acted as. You can also flag feed items you’d like to come back to just like you can star items in Google Reader.

I’m actually a bit excited for the new version of Origami to come out. It seems like Microsoft has taken at least a little bit more care this time in making a decent touch interface for some of the common tasks that users deal with on UMPCs. Unfortunately I’ve gotten word that it will be Vista only, which isn’t surprising considering Microsoft’s foolish desire to get low-power UMCPs running Vista. An ambitious independent developer is attempting to make a clone of OX2 that will run on XP; more on that later.\

[Chippy says: It's a shame that it's IE7-based. Firefox 3.0 is so much faster that it's hard to go back to an IE7-based browser now. I think i'm also right in saying that OX2 is only available to licensed partners so only new UMPC owners will get it...on Vista!]