I saw, I downloaded, I swore.
I’ll try to be clinical about my experiences.
I installed the OE2 download on a stock Samsung Q1U with Vista Home. I had already installed Vista SP1 and have Office 2007 installed and some third party apps. I’m using a 4gb Sony Micro Vault Tiny for dedicated to ReadyBoost (1).
The picture password screen is a great idea. It seems like it was just tacked on rather then integrated. My system used to boot directly to password screen with the keyboard displayed. Now I have to touch my user name, then old password screen flashes, then the picture password screen shows and waits for my input. Once I touch the too small next arrow, the old password screen flashes before the normal boot screen sequence. Not pretty.
After Vista finishes booting, I touch the “Origami Now” tab and the “Now” app shows and looks pretty good. I poke around and manage to get my weather location set so far so good. I press the “Origami Central” icon (it was a lucky guest). The splash screen displayed and I waited and waited and waited. It takes about 10 minutes to load. This is the main show stopper. I can’t imagine anyone on the dev team actually used it on a Q1U.
Once loaded it is reasonable responsive. I manage to add Feed Demon to my program menu. I found and pressed the Help button and got a help screed displayed in type so small I could hardly read it. I poked around and found no equivalent to IE7 font size control or enlargement control. So much for help.
The built-in Browser is ok, but it could have a built in keyboard for editing URLs rather than relying on Vista built in screen keyboard. Scrolling gestures were nice, but only seemed to work in the Browser. Other screens still displayed fat scroll bars (i.e. touchable). A confusing design. I’ll stick with Vista IE7.
The RSS reader is TOO basic. I’m not addicted to RSS, but I’ll stick to mature products like Feed Demon.
Next I tried Media. I’ve downloaded all kinds of music, podcasts webcasts. Gigabytes.of media and “Loading…” is apparently my favorite album, artist, genre and so on. It finds my “Dot Net Rocks” shows but none of my MSDN “How to” videos or on-demand webcasts. I’ll stick with Media Player (2)
I’ll play with Origami Experience 2.0 some more, but in the great Microsoft tradition, It will probably be much better in version 3.0.
I’ve close “Origami Central” and fired up Silicon Dust HD Home Run and watch the local news live.
(1) The Samsung Q1U has a nice built in high capacity SD card slot. Unfortunately the interface is too slow for ReadyBoost. A SD card that passes the ReadyBoost performance test when inserted thru an USB card reader will NOT pass the benchmark when inserted into the integrated SD slot.
(2) DO NOT use Media Center. It works but takes over you machine downloading program guides and updates and who knows what. Save Media center for you desktop.