Have you placed your Origami order?
Well the buzz this weekend is all about Origami. The website reveals very little. The music there is all mysterious and spooky. Actually it sounds a bit like some of the sound effects in Halo. Dig around and see what you find.
A marketing company called D-Kitchen has a very interesting video about the Microsoft Origami device. After you click the link to their site, click Enter, Work, BrandTheatre, Microsoft Origami. Their site requires Flash 7.x.
UPDATE: The D-Kitchen site links have disappeared. If you were fortunate enough to view the video beforehand, then you saw the goodies. If not, you can see some screenshots at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/origamigallery.asp
You’ll notice several interesting aspects of the device. Wireless, small, handwriting recognition, and unfortunately it’s butt ugly. Ok, I’m half teasing about that but I am used to seeing my gloss black PSP and I am not a fan of the white iPod. So when I saw the ivory and white device, I wanted to hurl.
A few other angles caught my eye and would have me considering a purchase and obviously a replacement of my PSP. First, I liked the size of the device. It’s obviously smaller than most of the other tablet PC’s on the market. I also liked the screen size which appears to be a widescreen in the 8–9” range.
You’ll notice in the video the young lady walks out to the backyard and controls her MCE desktop machine with the device. Unfortunately, you can’t really tell what is going on. It looks like she needs to get line-of-sight for the remote control to work. I hope not because that means Ir. I’d much rather see that work across a higher speed wireless network. You’ll also notice the Origami device appears to be running something that looks like the MCE shell. Ideally I’d love to see this device sync with a MCE machine and play music, Recorded TV or Recorded HDTV. As far as playing the TV content is concerned, I’d like to take it on the road or have it streamed if I am in close proximity to the mother ship. Scratch that, I want it where ever I’m at. Stream it across 802.11a/b/g, EVDO, UMTS or whatever.
It must be relatively powerful since running Halo requires some pretty serious resources. However if you look closely at the video, it doesn’t appear that the frame rate is that high. Oh well, lets hope they’re running a mobile NVIDIA Geforce Go 6800 or ATI Mobility Radeon 9800 or better. While we are applying the wish-list and speculating, lets throw in a multi core cpu.
The device looks like it is always on. It appears to use a cell phone network although the guy taking the pictures appeared to use his cell phone for the transfer. He’s unkewl anyway cause he wasn’t using Bluetooth to listen to his music.
The speculation on the internet has been rampant. I am not an insider on this project so I have no real knowledge. Even after I dig around a bit, I would not be able to share any information that isn’t apparent on the http://www.origamiproject.com website or through press releases. It looks like we’ll know a lot more in the next couple of days anyway.
Until then, what do you think it is? How much will it cost? What does it do? Does it solve world peace? 
The folks at http://www.dualcor.com/ have a device that looks really similar. The DualCor device is really interesting. It sports “A unique dual processor architecture and integrated 40GB hard drive allows the cPC to concurrently run both Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition and Windows® Mobile 5.0 applications while simultaneously supporting broadband data and phone connectivity. The device represents a new category of hardware for global enterprise computing and promises to end the compromise between mobility, functionality and productivity for the mobile business professional.”
Interesting stuff, eh?
