Thouch Pack: A company named Fortune Fountain has come up an innovative way for interactive via Thumbs named the “DialKeys”, Not a lot of know that there are actually production model Tablet PCs out there which has this Dial Keys feature. Fujitsu P1510D is one of the first. Matter of fact when you compare the spec of this Fujitsu Tablet PC with those of the UMPCs its very close.
More Screenshots and Prototypes at DialKeys
Launcher: It is the launching point for applications on UMPC devices and what you see in many of the marketing materials. At its simplest form, Program Launcher basically gives the user a way to easily categorize their applications to make them easier to find and easier to open on a small form factor pc. It’s also totally cool looking!
Won’t it be cool to have a button that has only the favorites that the user can customize to his / her needs ?
WIDWIWD(What I Did was What I Wanted to DO)not the actual name:This is just a little utility that a user can run that makes Windows more useable on a small, touch enabled computer. It makes about 10 setting changes to Windows such as widening the scroll bars, enlarging the minimize and maximize buttons, showing folders in thumbnail view, etc
Those Fat thumbed ones will for sure prefer a Bluetooth or a Full Sized Keyboard that has a dock for the UMPC.
Brilliant Black - A Customized Media Player: In order to make the media playback experience a breeze on the UMPCs they built a skin that fills the entire screen on the devices with large buttons to navigate the media controls such as play, stop, volume, etc.
Hope these BIG, Real Estate Consuming, Easy to use UI(not sure though) would have the AUTO HIDE feature built in to it, otherwise it’s pointless to have a 7″ Screen and watch videos in 5″ Look at this, you know what we mean…
DialKeys: This is built by a company called Fortune Fountain Ltd. and it is a really cool way to do text input with your thumbs.
We can imagine the finger prints that we’ll have on our UMPCs, hope some cool fingerprint proof screen protector comes up soon.
Sudoku: A completely addictive game that is huge in Europe right now and gaining popularity in the U.S. as well.
Well we just found out someone has booked the umpcgames.com domain and there’s going to be tones of them sooner.
Detailed information @ Origami Project
Interesting enough, the Origami Team at Microsoft has a history of how this all began, the team lead by Dustin has put up this information on their blog.
Dec 05 – My team and I have an idea about doing a buzz/viral campaign to get enthusiasts interested in what we’re announcing at CeBIT. I pitch the idea to Michael, our marketing guy, and he agrees it’s a good idea so he and I start planning it.
Jan 06 – We hired a creative agency to begin work on the viral campaign. We tell them to leave it vague and open to speculation to generate interest. After some discussion we decided to have the campaign kick-off 2 weeks prior to CeBIT to give it enough time for people to find out about it. We also decide to host it on the origamiproject.com domain, because that is going to be the UMPC community site that goes live after the CeBIT announcement. Also, we knew it would take only a matter of minutes for someone to do a Whois lookup to find out it was a Microsoft site without explicitly spelling it out.
Feb 23rd – Week 1 of 3 teaser goes live on origamiproject.com, 2 weeks ahead of CeBIT announcement. JkOnTheRun seems to be the first post of it, but it is when someone posts the site on Digg.com that we start getting significant traffic to the teaser. We end day one with about 28,000 hits. Our original estimates are 10,000 – 20,000 hits over the entire 2 weeks.
Feb 24th – Interest picks up on the site, word spreads and we get a post on Slashdot.com. We end the second day with about 65,000 more hits.
Feb 25th – March 1st – Digital Kitchen Video is found on the internet and mainstream media begins to pick up the story over the weekend. By Monday we are showing up on front page news stories and many TV programs. Monday ends with another 260,000 hits, and Tuesday we get another 200,000. People start thinking week 2 is the unveiling even though the site shows 3 week segments.
March 2nd – Teaser campaign week 2 goes live, we hide the words “Origami Project: the mobile pc running windows xp� in the HTML source to help settle down the speculation and give a clue. More accurate stories begin getting written by the media. Intel decides to launch a teaser with a date that aligns to their IDF conference on UMPC.com. The Origamiproject.com site gets another 480,000 hits on March 2nd with people hoping to find out what it is.
March 9th – Teaser campaign week 3 goes live in accordance with the CeBIT announcement and unveils UMPC with photos of the devices. At this point in the campaign we have had more than 2 million hits.
Read more about this at: Origami Project
Via Technologies made a press release that they are joining the party.
New VIA C7®-M ULV Processor Family, the World’s Lowest Power Mobile Processors, Enables Ultra Mobile Lifestyle Devices. Featuring the best performance-per-watt operation and the smallest footprint in the industry, the VIA C7-M ULV mobile processor will power the “SmartCaddie” Ultra Mobile PC from PBJ, Inc., on show at CeBIT 2006
Based on the VIA CoolStreamâ„¢ architecture, and manufactured using IBM’s 90nm SOI process, the VIA C7-M ULV processors are available at speeds from 1.0-1.5GHz with a maximum thermal design power (TDP) as low as 3.5 watts, and idle power as little as 0.1 watt ensuring unparalleled battery life. This is complemented by a low profile nanoBGA2 package measuring just 21mm x 21mm enabling designs with drastically reduced weight, size, and thickness. For more information on the VIA C7-M ULV processor, please visit the VIA website at: www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/c7-m_ulv/
This looks like the other version/color of the TabletKiosk Model that we came across, but a white iPod like finish. Sure enough, if this was the actual product in production it might grab more attention than any other UMPCs that we’ve seen so far.
