Since Friday, the blogosphere has been buzzing around the Origami Project, a life-changing Microsoft device that will be unveiled on March 2. Well....
"You might not have to wait a few weeks to find out what Origami truly is," writes Kevin Tofel. "Marketing firm DigitalKitchen must have the ad campaign on this one because if you hit their site and enter, click Work and then BrandTheatre, guess what you'll find. Not just pics of the device, but a Flash-based video showing the various uses."
The revelation was first made by Monk in a brief comment to an Engadget post.
PDA Mexico has grabbed eight stills from the DK movie and posted a 12MB mpeg version anyone can download. jkontherun also has screen caps.
The device looks similar to the ultraportable prototype that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates showed at WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, in 2005 (below). It's basically a small form factor Tablet PC so you can write on the screen. It also works as a Media Center Extender, so it provides a portable screen for watching movies etc from your main PC, as well as being a portable media player.
Comment: If this is the Origami then it's beyond carelessness to leave a video of it on the Web where someone will find it. Also, a prototype/demo project would usually have a code-name different from the final product name (though there are cases where the code-name stuck, eg Xbox), all of which suggets it's viral marketing. If so, it's working.
Whether the device will sell is another matter. PC users have had handheld computers since the 1980s (with the Poqet, Atari Portfolio etc), and tablet-based computers since the GRiDPad 1900 Pen Tablet in 1989. There are also several handheld/ultraportable XP machines such as the OQO (now available with XP Tablet PC Edition) and Vulcan's (Paul Allen's) long awaited FlipStart (first shown in February 2004). Numerous other handtops have been launched using the more space- and battery-friendly Windows CE (Windows Mobile) operating system, including five generations of Pocket PC devices.
They all have one thing in common: none of them has sold in big enough volumes to establish a new form factor. And that's what the Origami really needs to make it different.
