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HP Slate. Origami take 2? Video (and very few details.)


01-06-10hpslate

I’m looking at this and wondering if Microsoft and HP simply jumping on the wave of tablet hype and trying to break through with some viral marketing. There’s no real information available being given on this tablet so I can only assume it was a marketing move.

It looks like a 10 inch tablet with multitouch capacitive screen running Windows 7 and not dissimilar to a device I had hands-on with tonight.  It’s not a bad thing at all and I’m happy to see it but I wish this crazy tablet marketing race would end now.

Don’t expect too many details to surface on this one very soon but we’ll do our best to try and find out what’s going on here. Maybe it will appear in the Intel keynote at CES tomorrow.

Nokia and Microsoft shake hands on Mobile Productivity.


We’ve watched the crossover of hardware happen in the last 12 months, agreements to share core operating system elements between phone and PC manufacturers and today, with an agreement between Nokia and Microsoft, we’re seeing the user-level software seal the deal.

NEW YORK — Aug. 12, 2009 — The worldwide leader in software and the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer have entered into an alliance that is set to deliver a groundbreaking, enterprise-grade solution for mobile productivity. Today, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop and Nokia’s Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Öistämö announced the agreement, outlining a shared vision for the future of mobile productivity. This is the first time that either company has embarked on an alliance of this scope and nature.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies will begin collaborating immediately on the design, development and marketing of productivity solutions for the mobile professional, bringing Microsoft Office Mobile and Microsoft business communications, collaboration and device management software to Nokia’s Symbian devices. These solutions will be available for a broad range of Nokia smartphones starting with the company’s business-optimized range, Nokia Eseries. The two companies will also market these solutions to businesses, carriers and individuals.

This announcement builds on the existing work Nokia is doing by optimizing access to e-mail and other personal information with Exchange ActiveSync. Next year, Nokia intends to start shipping Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile on its smartphones, followed by other Office applications and related software and services in the future. These will include:

• The ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents on more devices in more places with mobile-optimized versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote

• Enterprise instant messaging and presence, and optimized conferencing and collaboration experience with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile

• Mobile access to intranet and extranet portals built on Microsoft SharePoint Server

• Enterprise device management with Microsoft System Center

“Having these two major players cooperating at this level will help us continue to meet our customers’ needs and reinforces our future business mobility strategy, inch said Diane Sanchez, head of Telefonica USA.

[Source]

There are many many journalists out there that are better positioned and experienced than I so, for commentary, I point you to the huge related linklist at Techmeme.

The only question I want to ask here is, are you excited about this? I personally don’t use Microsoft productivity products as all my work processes use cloud-based services so I’ll be really honest and say that I find this all rather boring! E-series Symbian-based devices and Microsoft Sync couldn’t be further down my wishlist!

‘Pseudotransparency’ on ‘Nano Touch’ Devices


This is really worth a read.

If the touch-sensitive surface on a mobile device were on the back instead, gestures like pointing, tapping, and selecting wouldn’t get in the way of the screen. At least, that’s the idea. But that creates a new challenge—seeing where your finger is going. So Baudisch’s team has been experimenting with a variety of approaches, including using transparent screens (which, unfortunately, don’t leave room for the electronic guts of most devices) and attaching a boom with a camera to a device’s backside (which is predictably clunky). Baudisch’s newest prototype, and the one he described yesterday, is called nanoTouch. It’s a squarish little gadget resembling an iPod nano, with a 2.4-inch screen that dominates the front and a capacative trackpad similar to the mousepad on a laptop computer attached to the back.

This rear-touch interface is incredibly interesting and very significant for portable devices but there’s more. Wade Roush, the author of the article,  goes on to highlight dual-screen interfaces too. He highlights two OQO devices hooked up into a dual-screen scenario with additional accelerometers that control screen orientation. It’s right up there with the roll-out screen as a distruptive technology. Don’t expect this to appear too soon though.

“The technology isn’t quite there to put dual-screen devices into production. Indeed, the second-generation OLPC device, while sexy, has all the signs of being vaporware. But Microsoft and other companies have poured too much money into tablet- and pen-based computing to let the technology’s development stop now. As Hinckley put it to me after his talk, “This is eventually going to happen. If Microsoft doesn’t do it, somebody else will. So it’s really important to understand what the issues are. inch

The video below (from New Scientist) show the rear-touch interface.

Take a look at the full article: At CHI Meeting, Microsoft Turns Computing Interfaces on Their Head, and Side, and Back | Xconomy.

Credit to Patrick Baudisch, Ken Hinckley and Meredith Ringel Morris of Microsoft Research.

3-years ago. A Look Back at the Origami Buzz.


NOTE. This article was written in 2009.

origami Three years ago today, Microsoft’s Origamiproject.com went live as a teaser website. [See original teaser page] One of the people to spot it was ‘Designtastesgood‘ who appears to have lit the fuse by sending a link to Robert Scoble who effectively posted another teaser. Engadget’s editor-in-chief at the time, Ryan Block, picked it up, added an image he’d acquired and wrote an article that evening which has 190 comments on it. If you have time, scan through them!

“So today Microsoft officially flipped the switch on the buzz machine for their Origami Project — an atypical viral marketing manuveur for a company whose products are usually known about years ahead of time. Scoble says its a device, the Internet’s lighting up with rumors — is it the Xbox portable? Well, we dunno, but as usual got our hands on some pictures. And as usual we can’t guarantee they’re the real deal, though we are pretty confident in their source. So, let’s go over it: these were sent to us detailing it as a Microsoft portable media player, which wouldn’t be too far off from what Jobs and BusinessWeek both prophesied Microsoft doing (despite being pretty broadly denied from within).”

Read the full story

VIA, Microsoft launch ‘Bazaar’ program for white-box netbooks.


The blogosphere tends to be fairly polarized in terms of netbook reporting. In the western world, where most of the English-speaking bloggers, readers and advertisers are, we have a slick range of style-oriented designs that are mostly based on the Intel Atom processor. In other parts of the world, the situation is rather different. The focus is on functional, simple and extremely low cost PCs.

In developing countries, where SMS’ are used to agree contracts between remote communities, the idea of a 10" screen with a keyboard alone would be something new. It wouldn’t matter what’s inside it as long as it provides a basic computing experience and that’s why many people believe (including myself) that the big wave, the big sales numbers, will be in China, India and Africa.

VIA already does good trade in these areas with simple designs based on what we consider to an be ‘old’ C7-M processor. Microsoft already does trade with starter editions of XP, again, something we consider to be an old OS but it looks like the two companies want to get together, with a bunch of others, to really optimise their products and marketing for this segment with a new initiative called the Global Mobility Bazaar.

VIA Technologies, Inc., a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the’Global Mobility Bazaar’ (GMB), an innovative industry infrastructure program aimed at driving the rapid global adoption of affordable mobilecomputing devices.

Through the GMB program, VIA is partnering with over 15 GMB manufacturers and infrastructure partners in China on the development of a wide variety of mini-notes, netbooks, and notebooks based around VIA’s ultra low power processor platforms.

Equipped with the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, these systems will deliver an optimized mobile computing and Internet experience across a variety of form factors with screen sizes ranging from 7" to 15".

[full press release. Website]

There are two things to note here. 1) XP looks like it will live on and in this program, you can bet that its being given away for next to nothing. 2) This looks like an X86-only initiative that will be used in positioning against ARM-based netbooks.

I spoke to VIA about this program yesterday. They are obviously excited about it and rightly so. They’ve seen what happened with sales of cheap mobile phones into developing countries and they want to stimulate the same thing with low-end portable computing devices. Sandisk, AMI (BIOS) and other partners are involved and we should be seeing the first netbooks becoming available at the end of December, they tell me.

Microsoft eases up on ULCPC criteria


Yes the ridiculous acronym of ULCPC (Ultra Low Cost PC) which mostly means netbook, was a term defined by Microsoft not too long ago. They said that devices which qualified as ULCPCs would be able to get discounts on XP installations, making OEMs more likely to make their hardware fit Microsoft’s ULCPC criteria so that they could receive the XP discount. One theory explaining the XP discount move and associated ULCPC definition is to keep a Windows OS on emerging netbooks, and of course prevent Linux environments from ruling the space. The hardware limitations are possibly meant to make sure that netbooks don’t encroach on Vista’s regular home computing space. Otherwise you would have OEMs offering XP as an install option on new desktop purchases and other hardware while MS is trying to convert everything to XP.

From InfoWorld on XP pricing: “The documents show that for developed markets, Microsoft charges $32 to install XP Home Edition on standard netbooks, and $47 for netbooks with the larger screens. PC makers who meet certain requirements in Microsoft’s Market Development Agreement can get a discount of as much as $10 on those prices, the documents show.”

Many people however, myself included, were a bit upset with Microsoft for making a pretty stupid definition of the ULPCP. Microsoft said that units over 10.2″ screen size, 80GB HDD, and those with touchscreens could not qualify as a ULCPC and thus would not receive the XP discount. Maybe this is why nearly every netbook has an 8.9″-10″ screen and doesn’t have touch input?

Whatever the case, it looks like Microsoft is easing up the criteria it laid down previously. Now MS is saying that a ULCPC can include a screen up to 14.1″, and it can be touchscreen. Additionally, the 80GB HDD cap has been raised to 160GB. This is nice but there are still more restrictive limitations in place such as the CPU which MS says can only have one core and run at no higher than 1GHz, or how about the 1GB of RAM cap? If MS didn’t have some sort of super strategy behind all of this I think that defining something as a ULCPC just by its price would work fine and would not be in the way of low cost computers becoming more main stream. I wonder what MS would think about a computer running a Core Solo CPU, which is actually a Core Duo with only one functioning core…

[InfoWorld via GBM]

Origami Experience 2.0 released


Its been available pre-loaded on HTC Shifts before, but now its finally out for all ultra mobile PC owners to download. Go get it.

The Origami Experience 2.0 is designed for Ultra-Mobile PCs that run Windows Vista. To run the Origami Experience 2.0, a ultra mobile PC with the following specifications is recommended:  

  • Minimum 100 MB of available hard disk space
  • Minimum 1 GB of system memory
  • Touch panel display (required for Origami Picture Password)

The Origami Experience 2.0 requires the following software installed:  

  • Windows Internet Explorer 7. Origami Experience 2.0 requires Internet Explorer 7 for its RSS platform.
  • Windows Media Player 11. Origami Central requires Windows Media Player 11 in order to manage and play media.
  • Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. The calendar tile in Origami Now works only with Office Outlook 2007 Calendar. The mail tile in Origami Now works with Office Outlook 2007 Mail and Windows Mail.
  • The Windows update available here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932406 . This update is highly recommended if you use the mail tile in Origami Now with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.

Nettops get XP extension


nettopumpc Microsoft truly want to kill Origami devices. They’ve now extended the XP timeline for nettops.

Customers and partners have made it clear to us that they want Windows on their netbooks and nettops," said Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of the Original Equipment Manufacturer Division at Microsoft. "We are committed to providing Windows solutions for these devices, helping to ensure a high-quality experience for both our partners and customers.

Steven Guggenheimer. ultra mobile PC customers here have made it pretty clear too. Hello Mc Guggenheimer, anybody home?

The Microsoft press release doesn’t include any definition of the Intel-coined ‘nettop’ expression.

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