I was actually excited enough about Origami Experience 2.0 to reinstall Windows Vista on my Samsung Q1 Ultra. The interface is actually rather pretty. The applets are arranged in "tiles" and selecting a tile brings it up front. The addition of "picture passwords" is interesting too.
There are problems, though:
- The RSS reader type thing didn't seem to populate with anything. If there was a button to manually refresh it, I could not find it.
- To configure any given widget, the widget must be selected and the menu item "Main tile options" must be selected. This is just about the opposite of intuitive. How difficult would it have been to put a little gear on the corner of each tile once it's selected?
- The software adds value to UMPCs but not enough to justify the Vista overhead.
If this was incorporated into UMPCs when they were first released, they could have gained traction as a "secondary desktop display" when they weren't mobile. With Vista the exclusive target for UMPCs, CPU and battery capability must rise while costs must fall.
I've said before that Vista killed the UMPC for at least two years. It's now a year and a half into that time. Within the next six months, UMPCs need to pack enough CPU, RAM, and graphics horsepower to run Vista without lag else they will fade into the shadows of MIDs, ULCPCs (that's a new acronym: Ultra-low-cost-PCs like the Eee) and even rich, large-screen smartphones.
Origami Experience 2.0 isn't without merit. It shows Microsoft is still developing for this platform and shows what devices of this type COULD do. However, it should be improved as a feature yet still be a sideline to the function. After all: Why would someone buy a UMPC?
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