Actually that'd be a great idea, CTitanic: An official Origami Team blog post on all the settings you can possibly tweak to get your UMPC as functional as possible with Vista. I do very much enjoy the handwriting recognition improvements and visual styling. Maybe MS will take me up on my other offer, but I doubt it ;)

Jeremy:

I have a Q1b as my personal machine and with 1GB response times are quite good. My personal experience is that the RAM makes a bigger difference than CPU.

Hi Jeremy.

Thanks for the post.
You have a Q1B but you say nothing about the video response. Can you play videos on your Q1B through either Media player or Media Center or OE?

I guess you have the same problem as the others - it doesnt work. When are VIA going to release drivers for the mpeg4/wmv hardware?

Steve.

ThoughtFix:

Maybe MS will take me up on my other offer, but I doubt it ;)

An origami tattoo. Its got to be worth more than a UMPC. A lifetime's OE ad spot on a UMPC bloggers arm? 5-10K surely.

ThoughtFix:

Maybe MS will take me up on my other offer, but I doubt it ;)

Let us know if they take you up on that offer!!! 

Thoughfix, here is a video of the Origami Experience running in a Asus R2H which is from the celeron devices the slower. As you can see from that video the performance on that device is a lot better what you have in your VIA device. The major problem is not Vista, or Origami Experience running in a UMPC. It's VIA. Just that. The VIA Processor included in our eo V7110 is just not good for Vista.

ctitanic:

. It's VIA. Just that. The VIA Processor included in our eo V7110 is just not good for Vista.

Hmm ... I did see the video. While their experience was better, it doesn't take away my original complaint: Devices heavily backed by Microsoft, expensive, and less than a year old are now rendered obsolete by the bloat, driver requirements, and other Vista issues. They both want to be "the future" but it's more than an issue of "the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing." It's more like "the left hand is holding the right hand down."  The Asus R2H is the ONLY device on the market on which I've seen show a good Origami Experience demonstration. The R2H was also late to market by comparison, having only shipped five months ago. This means that all early adopters (both consumers and manufacterers) are pretty well screwed. There's NO upgrade path for ultra-mobiles and now, with Vista out, you can bet there is no continued user experience development planned for XP UMPC users.

ctitanic:

It's VIA. Just that. The VIA Processor included in our eo V7110 is just not good for Vista.

One clarification on that. If VIA hardware acceleration of WMV9 and MPEG4 was supported you'd get much better video performance. Interestingly enough, video playback using zoomplayer on Vista is much better than OE, WMP or WMC.
My guess is that either you will see new drivers for the Medion/OQO Model 02 devices OR they will ship a VIA media application which would be a real stinger.

Steve.

chippy:

An origami tattoo. Its got to be worth more than a UMPC. A lifetime's OE ad spot on a UMPC bloggers arm? 5-10K surely.

Yeah - perhaps - but I am willing to offer it at a DEEP discount because I do very sincerely believe that this platform is the future of information, communication, education, and entertainment. I blog because I want people to embrace this - it will make the world a better place. Imagine having no school books: Only a tablet on which all your scholastic information resides. Imagine having all your homework interactive - where the teacher can see not only your submitted answer to a problem but also all the mental work and research you went through to find it. Imagine having been able to attend class while you were snowed in at home.  That's only the education side.

You all know my Nokia Internet Tablet blog as well - One of the Nokia product managers follows my blog and she asked me how I got all the energy and enthusiasm over these products. I told her a bit on how my life was shaped by growing up surrounded by technology, but then went on to explain how I think the world WILL be a better place when the hive mind of the world, in the form of the Internet, is available to everyone.

I take my UMPC around quite a bit and it's a nice conversation starter. People want to know about it, what it can do, and what it costs. After hundreds of these conversations, I found that what stops people from owning UMPCs are two things: Cost and Fear.

1. Cost: This is obvious: While they were rumored to be in the $600 range, they're typically $900-$2500.
2. Fear: They fear they'd pay for it and never use it. They fear they'd buy it for an intended purpose and realize it cannot serve that purpose. They fear that technology will move so fast, it'd make their investment obsolete and they'd have to scrap and re-learn from scratch if they want to adopt the form factor. They fear that it's a fad like the Newton, eventually totally abandoned by it's backer and never to be visited upon again.

Both complaints above are given additional fuel by the release of Vista. It's expensive and it obsolesces the previous (quite high) investments by both manufacturers and consumers.

ThoughtFix:

ctitanic:

. It's VIA. Just that. The VIA Processor included in our eo V7110 is just not good for Vista.

The Asus R2H is the ONLY device on the market on which I've seen show a good Origami Experience demonstration.

Here is another Origami Experience demostration, I did not linked in my previous post because it's a better device.

But, if the Origami Experience runs in that way in an Asus you can be sure that it will run a lot better in a Q1, i7209 and i7210. So once again, it narrows the problems to one group: Those using VIA.

I agree with you in the rest. We need the Vista Drivers, we need the HID Drivers and we need the restrictions to be removed from WMM and DVDMaker. But to say that all UMPC in the market have a bad performance when it comes to Vista or Origami Experience is just wrong.

chippy:

ctitanic:

It's VIA. Just that. The VIA Processor included in our eo V7110 is just not good for Vista.

One clarification on that. If VIA hardware acceleration of WMV9 and MPEG4 was supported you'd get much better video performance. Interestingly enough, video playback using zoomplayer on Vista is much better than OE, WMP or WMC.
My guess is that either you will see new drivers for the Medion/OQO Model 02 devices OR they will ship a VIA media application which would be a real stinger.

Steve.

I agree, but what is needed to have WMV9 and MPEG4 support? A new processor. So that is not making any good to our friend Toughtfix. His device (and one of mine) got completely obsolete in 9 months. But to be honest, that's something that happens often in our tech world.

Hi, new lurker here. Question regarding the UMPC hardware check; how does it know? Does it look at the processor class? I.E I have a Vaio 280P, is this really classified as a UMPC, will I be able to install the OE pack when I transitition to Vista? Thanks in advance for your response.

ctitanic:

I agree, but what is needed to have WMV9 and MPEG4 support? A new processor. So that is not making any good to our friend Toughtfix.

I agree that the v7110's will be almost impossible to get working well under Vista (WRT media)
The Q1B has a chance becuase it has the VX700 chipset.  Only software fix needed there.

I advise those with V7110s to group together to find the optimal XP-based solution. XP is currently a better solution for UMPCs than Vista (R2H and Q1 are possibly exceptiions)  I'm looking at streetdeck as an OE substitute for XP-based UMPCs and I think it could work nicely. Its not free but you get a whole lot more that OE. There's a StreetDeck lite version available now.

Steve.

anonymousX:

Hi, new lurker here. Question regarding the UMPC hardware check; how does it know? Does it look at the processor class? I.E I have a Vaio 280P, is this really classified as a UMPC, will I be able to install the OE pack when I transitition to Vista? Thanks in advance for your response.

Hi AnonymousX

I am asking myself the same question. If it doesn't work on a Viao then there has been some tweaking going on to block out non 'Origami' devices. Is the new UX380p recognised as a UMPC?

I really hate that the UMPC definition is confusing everyone. a UMPC is an Ultra Mobile PC. Not an MS Partner Ultra Mobile PC.

Sorry MS people here but I think that the decision to partition MS-sanctioned devices as different was a bad choice for the market in general.

Steve.

ThoughtFix:

I take my UMPC around quite a bit and it's a nice conversation starter. People want to know about it, what it can do, and what it costs. After hundreds of these conversations, I found that what stops people from owning UMPCs are two things: Cost and Fear.

1. Cost: This is obvious: While they were rumored to be in the $600 range, they're typically $900-$2500.
2. Fear: They fear they'd pay for it and never use it. They fear they'd buy it for an intended purpose and realize it cannot serve that purpose. They fear that technology will move so fast, it'd make their investment obsolete and they'd have to scrap and re-learn from scratch if they want to adopt the form factor. They fear that it's a fad like the Newton, eventually totally abandoned by it's backer and never to be visited upon again.

Both complaints above are given additional fuel by the release of Vista. It's expensive and it obsolesces the previous (quite high) investments by both manufacturers and consumers.

I totally agree with you on this point. To be honest, from the point of view of IT Manager, there are only two winners and one loser with Vista. The winners are Microsoft who will get a lot of money from this upgrade and the hardware makers who will have more sales. The losers are we. To give you an idea. I work for a business that have more than 100 pcs, all of them using 2000. If I do want to upgrade all of them to Vista, I will have to buy new video cards, upgrade my NA Interprise to suport Vista, upgrade my accounting software because it use an SQL version not supported by Vista, etc. Total for all these upgrades, more than 200 000 dollars.

I completely agree with ThoughtFix. Here at work I get people all the time asking about UMPCs. But once I tell the the price they think I'm crazy for paying what I paid for the Q1. In some ways I agree. When I ask them a price they would pay for one, the highest I get is $650.