OQO

» see oqo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

in 2007 microsoft and intel were pushing a category called the ultra-mobile pc. small enough to hold in one hand, full windows installed, intended to be the bridge between laptops and phones. oqo had been building exactly that since 2000, six years before microsoft's origami project existed. the oqo model 01 shipped in october 2004 at 0.9 pounds, with a 5-inch display, a slide-out thumb keyboard, and a 1ghz transmeta crusoe cpu running windows xp. it cost around $1,900.

oqo was a san francisco startup founded by jory bell with five cofounders who had come out of apple, ibm, and the original interval research group. the engineering was unusual for the era. they were doing pocketable x86 hardware before anyone else had figured out the thermals and the battery problem. the model 01 won design awards. guinness gave it a record for smallest full-featured personal computer.

the model 02 shipped in january 2007 with a via c7-m cpu, a backlit keyboard, an optional ev-do mobile broadband module, and an active digitizer pen. it ran windows vista. bill gates introduced it in his ces keynote that year as the world's smallest windows vista pc. it cost around $1,500 in the base configuration.

~ the record ~

~ what went wrong ~

two things happened in 2007 that oqo did not survive. apple shipped the iphone in june, which made the entire "pocketable windows pc" pitch instantly look like an answer to the wrong question. and the asus eee pc shipped in october, which proved that customers who wanted a small windows computer would happily buy a 7-inch netbook for $400 instead of a pocketable for $1,500. the umpc category got squeezed from both sides at once.

oqo tried to respond with the model 02+ in 2008, which added a faster cpu and an oled display option, but the company was already burning through cash faster than it could ship. in may 2009 a funding round fell through and oqo ceased operations. the website went dark and customers with warranty claims were left holding hardware that nobody would service.

~ the umpc was the wrong shape ~

the broader category oqo defined died with it. microsoft's origami initiative limped on for another year or two through samsung and fujitsu but nobody bought those either. the lesson was that running full windows on a 5-inch screen with a thumb keyboard was a worse experience than running a real os designed for that form factor, which is what ios and android then delivered. the umpc was a transitional category that ended up not transitioning anywhere.

oqo from ankara was always a magazine product, never something you saw at a store. i remember the model 02 from gadget blogs around 2007, the same year i was probably reading engadget on a desktop ie or firefox at home over ttnet adsl. it looked like the future, but it was the wrong future. the future that won was the one apple shipped in june of that year, the one that did not need a windows logo on it to be useful.

~ the long tail ~

the oqo brand was not revived. the design dna shows up indirectly in later attempts at pocketable x86, like the gpd pocket line that arrived in 2017 and built a small enthusiast following. those products learned from oqo without saying so. they kept the form factor and dropped the premium pricing.

what oqo proved, before it died, was that the engineering challenge of pocketable full windows pcs was solvable. what oqo could not prove was that anyone outside a few thousand mobile-professional enthusiasts actually wanted to pay for one. the answer to the question turned out to be no.

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