Microsoft Origami (UMPC)

» see microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/umpc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

origami showed up in my forum reading window around march 2006. i was 22, finishing engineering school, on a ttnet adsl line that had just gone broadband at home. donanimhaber and frmtr were both running cover threads on the samsung q1 when it leaked. i never bought a umpc, but the model lineup was a fixture in the windows enthusiast scene for two or three years. the leaked specs and the price tags were the kind of thing engineering students would argue about during lunch.

microsoft and intel formally revealed the platform at cebit hanover on 9 march 2006, after a teaser site that ran in february under the project origami name. the spec called for a touchscreen of 7 inches or less, a minimum resolution of 800x480, and windows xp tablet pc edition as the os. the samsung q1 was the launch device, with the amtek t700 alongside it. asus, oqo, fujitsu, and a few smaller brands followed in the next eighteen months.

the asus eee pc launched in october 2007 at a price umpc never approached. the iphone had already launched that june, dragging the consumer expectation of what a touch device should feel like in a direction the umpc could not follow. the ipad shipped on 3 april 2010 and turned the umpc into a museum piece overnight. by 2011 the surviving brands had quietly discontinued their lines.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the teaser campaign in february 2006 was a microsoft marketing experiment. a single web page with a countdown, no product info, a vague promise of a new device class. tech blogs spent two weeks guessing. the actual reveal was anticlimactic, since the device class turned out to be a small touchscreen pc running xp at around a thousand dollars. people had been hoping for something cheaper and lighter.

the samsung q1 itself was an interesting object. a 7-inch screen, a stylus, no keyboard, an intel celeron m, half a gig of ram, a 40gb hard disk, around 780 grams. it could run any windows program. the input experience was the problem. xp had not been redesigned for a touch screen at that size, so most of the time you were tapping at standard taskbar pixels with a stylus or with a fingertip that covered three controls at once. an on-screen split keyboard called dialkeys was bundled to soften the typing problem. it did not solve it.

~ the cracks ~

umpc had a one-thousand-dollar price floor against a netbook market that started at around three hundred fifty dollars a year and a half later. it had a battery life of two to three hours against a netbook's six to eight. it ran a desktop os against an interface that wanted a touch os. each of those problems was solvable, in theory. none of them got solved in the umpc generation. the form factor was right and the software stack was wrong.

the iphone proved in june 2007 that a small touch device should run an os designed for the finger. the umpc never got that os. windows vista in 2007 was heavier than xp and made the situation worse. windows 7 in 2009 was better but still not built for the form factor. microsoft tried again with windows 8 in 2012 on a different hardware bet, surface rt, which has its own grave.

~ what it became ~

umpc died as a consumer product but the form factor showed up later in rugged industrial devices, medical carts, vehicle-mount terminals, places where windows compatibility mattered more than touch usability. the gpd pocket and one-mix lines in 2017 onward are a small enthusiast continuation, running modern windows on the same 7-inch class hardware that origami pioneered. they are sold to a tiny audience that knows exactly what it wants. that audience still uses the umpc word as a category tag on aliexpress and on banggood.

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