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New York Times columnist joins Origami critics: ‘Feels so wrong’
May 4, 2006 | 7:23 am
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By David Rothman
First we learn that Times Reader software may well be delayed due to Vista running late, at least if Gartner is right about the OS. Now Microsoft gets more bad news involving the New York Times.
Columnist David Pogue tested Samsung’s Q1 and writes that the Origami/Ultra Mobile PC class of machine “feels so wrong. It aims to bridge the size gulf between a palmtop and a laptop, but winds up inheriting the worst aspects of each. Like a palmtop, it feels claustrophobic, clumsy for text input and, with its exposed touch screen, vulnerable. Like a laptop, it’s expensive, has short battery life and requires two hands to operate.”
About the screen, Pogue clearly disagrees with the enthusiasts:
Standard screen resolution on the Ultra Mobile PC is an oddball 800 by 480 pixels. Those are such peculiar dimensions, in fact, that many of Windows’s own dialogue boxes don’t fit. Even when they’re up against the top of the screen, they extend past the screen’s bottom edge — so important buttons like OK, Print and Cancel are unclickable. In software, this is what’s known as a Big Oops.
In such situations, a workaround is available. You can press a button to choose one of two higher screen resolutions: 800 by 600 pixels or 1024 by 600. This is not some kind of Harry Potter magic that creates new pixels from the air; the screen still has only 800 by 480 actual pixels. Instead, these modes are simulations, created through software trickery and resulting in slight distortion and text blurriness.
So what’s the big unanswered question mentioned in the headline? “Why?”–as in: Why did Microsoft create this $1,100 machine?
Actually I think that the Times was a little harsh. The right external keyboard could address that issue. What I’m really interested in seeing is the screen, and whether it can somehow be tricked into displaying e-books with reasonable sharpness. As for battery life, I’m going to regard this machine as like the Cybook–probably best suited for indoor use with a power outlet near by. For true portability I myself will continue to rely on PDAs or my little eBookWise tablet, whose resolution, by the way, is far worse than Samsung’s.
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Comments:
you have enumerated the shortcomings of the habnd mobile , but , it would have been better if you had included it’s uses as well . like , it’s portable , easy to manage , affordable , and agreat way to stay in touch with friends and family.
Affordable at $1,100? I love the talk of the $500-$600 price and the prospect of further drops, but we’re not quite there yet.
The problem is the OS I think.
Bill Gates has been excited about handheld, and then pen-enabled, computing for something like 20 years. He seems to be the driving force in MSFT behind all these efforts.
The wall he’s constantly stumbling over is the OS. Make it small enough to enable good battery life, and MSFT must come up with a new OS, which then competes on a more-equal footing against EPOC, Palm, and others. Make it full-on MS-Windows, and MSFT can leverage its OS monopoly to give this form-factor a great advantage (and guarantee compatibility with just about every eBook format there is, which is great for us).
MSFT has come out with WinCE, (now mobile) to try to monopolize the market standardized by Palm. But PDAs are dying, and smart phones can’t run WinXP (yet). So this UMPC is an effort to fill the gap.
When MSFT and Intel first talked about these things a couple years back, they said it wouldn’t be practical until 2008 or so, when Intel’s roadmap for future processors would have very-low-power fully x86 chips available.
My guess is that MSFT wants to grab an early attention lead over Apple, which has had a small form tablet in its labs for at least a couple of years (in 2004 summer, Steve Jobs announced he had such a project and had decided not to market it yet).
Meantime the Origami/UMPC initiative has already borne some fruit, as Samsung announced a single-chip 7″ 800×480 lcd solution this week. The generations of UMPC between now and 2008 will be expensive and battery-devouring but will, if they can make enough money to keep them in the market, drive down the manufacturing costs to screens and other hardware so that, when the tiny, very-low-power x86 chips come from Intel, a decent UMPC will be possible, with low cost and good battery life.
I would hope that this happens, and that Apple joins in with the video iPod and enabling apps to read eBooks on it, and that by that time, a couple more generations of eInk will drive down prices there, and maybe make color eInk economical, and that we will find scads of hardware possibilities.
2008 is only a couple years away. Here’s hoping it comes true then.
Bingo about the OS and battery life, Pond! Perhaps billg is hoping for some miracle battery technology to bail him out. As you’ve noted later in your post, battery life could indeed improve. Meanwhile, despite the Origami’s flaws, I applaud Microsoft for its efforts, which will indeed spur people to improve the tech. – David
“What I’m really interested in seeing is the screen, and whether it can somehow be tricked into displaying e-books with reasonable sharpness.”
I don’t know about the sharpness, but this reviewer said a bug in the current version made reading in portrait mode nearly impossible.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194236,00.html
“The Q1 would make a good e-book reader too, except for a bug. When I hit a button to change the screen orientation to vertical, the screen started sensing touches at the wrong places, making the computer nearly useless.”