All the recent news and chatter about a potential Apple tablet reminds me of Microsoft's Origami. Remember that? The UMPC push that got so much press a couple of years ago?
I love the idea. I was one of the first to jump on that bandwagon. I bought a Samsung Q1 when they first came out and used it as much as possible. I was using Verizon's mobile services at the time and tethered my phone to the Q1 so that I could use it just about anywhere. Such great potential.
My Q1 started getting used less and less frequently though, and is now collecting dust. Why? What happened?
The screen resolution was too low. Some would argue that 800 x 480 is a really nice screen for such a small device, but hey, in today's word even 1280 x 800 feels cramped. Try using something like Outlook at 800x480 for a period of time and you'll likely start to agree that it's just a bit too small to be ideally useful.
The screen size was too small. Directly related to the resolution issue was the physical size. My Q1 has a 7" screen which feels just slightly too small. My Dell XT Tablet PC has a 12" screen, which is great. I'm not sure if there is a smaller (than 12") ideal size or not since I haven't had experience working with anything between 7-12". Perhaps 10" would be good. I'd need some serious work time on it to be sure.
The battery life on the Q1 was horrible. A mobile device of any kind with battery power limited to only about two hours is totally unacceptable in today's world. Even three years ago it was barely acceptable.
The Q1 was painfully slow. I think that anyone who attempted to do serious daily computing on the Q1 likely realized fairly soon that it was quite under-powered. Even fairly basic operations felt painfully slow to someone used to fairly zippy desktop performance.
I don't think XP was the ideal OS. My Q1 was running XP Tablet Edition, which wasn't great - largely because of the physical challenges of the Q1. I'm not sure if a better OS like Windows 7 would have made a large difference or not. (Hmm... I wonder if Windows 7 would run on the Q1. That might be an interesting experiment some day.)
Microsoft was ahead of the curve with the UMPC movement. It obviously didn't flesh-out the way they had hoped though. The hardware technology wasn't quite ready for the movement. The software was close but also still needed some improvements to be ideal.
It will be interesting to see if 1) Apple really does release a tablet device this year (the rumor mills have been wrong before) and 2) if they are able to address the concerns that prevented the UMPC push from a few years ago from really taking off.
BTW - I run Windows 7 on my Dell XT tablet and I love it - both the Dell XT hardware and also Windows 7. It's a great combination. There are some things I'd change if I had my ideal setup, but I'll leave those comments for a different day's post.
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