Microsoft Origami (2006) [video]

I still kinda miss the era of UMPCs (how much has it been since I last used that term).

I always wanted tablets to be small PCs, not big phones. The whole mobile thing strips them of most of their productive potential, as they have most apps thought for quick glances and activities (social networks, feed readers, small games) rather than something that might take a considerable amount of time to do.

Thankfully there are exceptions in both fully tablet-oriented apps (just look how well Frozen Synapse works on Android tablets) and, as of lately, x64-powered tablets that can run intensive desktop apps.

Here's a photo of.. 9 years ago(?) of me running Halo on a Samsung Q1 ultra (on Windows XP!) https://s3.amazonaws.com/f.cl.ly/items/1C3n3Z3F0o0w3f3L2N1q/...

It had a weak CPU for the time (Celeron 1Ghz single core or worse) and bad battery life, but featured some pretty quirks (mouse could be controller either via the resistive touch screen or an analog stick on the side, also arrow keys are mapped to a dpad, pretty handy for gaming I guess?) which I hoped would set the future for tablets to come, but they failed miserably, and now we're stuck with laggy capacitive screens covering the whole device with no decent haptic feedback whatsoever.

This is the first video I ever watched on YouTube. Revisiting it makes me realise just how far tablets/phones have come to surpass this vision. It also shows how much we are blinkered in our imagination by what is currently possible.

When I first watched this in 2006, the most appealing thing about it was that it showed people using devices that they didn't have to baby. They were lightweight and robust devices, and the people in the video didn't seem worried about knocking or dropping them, in marked contrast to laptops. And then what came out? UMPCs, which were expensive and non-robust.

The thing I always liked about the concept was buttons. These days buttons on a device are out of style but they can make certain tasks easier or more enjoyable. Look at the guy playing the game. Games that try to emulate buttons on screen never work right. Also I kinda liked the chunkiness of it. Easy to hold, doesn't look like you're going to break if you look at it wrong. I'd love to buy a Windows 10 device in this form factor.

You know, this is one reason Microsoft needed to be making their own hardware, about a decade ago...

They are more on the right track now, but it's not in their DNA yet.