Doug’s World

Meeting Origami’s Creator

When you fly Business Class across the Atlantic, chances are you’ll sit next to somebody from Microsoft. Hell, chances are you are somebody from Microsoft.

So it was no surprise when I took my seat on NW33 from Amsterdam to Sea-Tac yesterday that it was a Microsoft person next to me. But this time, as opposed to my last three flights, it wasn’t anyone from DPE: it was Otto Berkes, the creator of the much-talked-about Origami mobile PC. He and members of his team were returning from CeBIT, the massive German computer show, where the Origami had just been announced.

Origami isn’t really a product, it’s a specification for a new class of products. And it’s not really called Origami any more, either: that was the code name, and now it has been released as the Ultra Mobile PC platform. But most people are still saying Origami, so I will too.

If you don’t know about Origami (as I didn’t until I heard of it on Scoble’s blog a few days ago), here are a few places to learn more:

The press release announcing the Ultra Mobile PC.
The official Ultra Mobile PC home page.
The Channel 9 video with Otto Berkes. (Here’s a text summary of the video, on the Origami portal.)
A post on Chris Pratley’s blog about OneNote and the Origami.

And here are a few photos I took on the flight yesterday:

The top photo shows that it’s just a normal Windows XP computer, so it works the way you’d expect, the way you already know. The bottom left photo shows the pop-up keyboard, designed for use when holding the device in two hands, the bottom center shows the new interface for launching programs (which is an extension to Windows XP, and the only thing that makes Origami’s version of XP different from the one running on your desktop), and the bottom right shows an example of a game that has been redesigned for the Origami platform.

They’ll be manufactured by a variety of companies, and there will be models available with a variety of features ranging from stripped-down $500 models to studly $1000 ones (roughly). And these manufacturers are all signing up on their own because they see the opportunity to make money on this platform: unlike the Tablet PC, this isn’t a platform that Microsoft is trying to force upon the market with bribes and intimidation. The model that Otto showed me is one of the first from Samsung, a pre-production hand-assembled unit that is identical to the actual model you’ll be able to buy from Samsung in a couple of months.

I’ll try to explain what I thought about this device after a couple hours of hanging out with its creator. It was an interesting time to run into Otto: the Wall Street Journal being passed out on the plane had coverage of the Origami announcment, and a guy seated nearby came over and asked a bunch of questions. Origami has had a lot of buzz in the last few days.

I found Otto and I shared a few things in our experience and perspective. He worked in Intel assembly language in the 80s, thinks in terms of actual CPU activity rather than high-level metaphors (e.g., he shares my view of C++ as a high-level language, definitely not a low-level one), and Defender was his favorite coin-op game. He’s the kind of person with whom I could discuss the subtleties of designing well-behaved TSRs or the memory mapping of PC video cards; I described the design of SCS-Draw (written in Z80 assembly language), and he described the work he did to optimize AutoCAD for PC displays (in 80×86 assembly language).

Need I say more? Otto has a fixation on efficiency and performance that has become too rare in the technology world these days, and he hasn’t lost touch with what a computer really is: a CPU with a tiny instruction set, marching through RAM executing machine language one opcode at a time. I mention all of that because I think it’s relevant to what Origami is all about. There is a low-level focus on many aspects of Origami’s design that I found refreshing.

Here’s one example. It uses an 800×480 display resolution, sort of like a wide-screen DVD player. That means some software, expecting the 4:3 aspect ratios that are common on PC monitors (as opposed to Origami’s 5:3), will have buttons that are rendered off the bottom of the screen. So how to get to those buttons?

Otto’s solution was to include a function in Origami’s design that switches the screen into a 1024×768 emulation mode, quickly and simply with the press of a button that happens to be right under your left index finger. And this is done at the driver level, so it’s fast and reliable and just plain works. It’s not a layer of extra code running on top of everything else, as is so common these days, it’s a low-level feature that’s built right into the device. This mentality is reflected in many other aspects of Origami’s design as well.

Origami has been widely critiqued and discussed the last few days. “Bastard child of a tablet PC and a PDA” is one criticism I saw recently, and I think that’s also a good way of saying what’s really cool about Origami. It’s a new option, a place on the power/portability curve that hasn’t been well-served yet.

Consider that when you buy a portable computing device these days, you have these four general choices:

Smart phones. They’re tiny, they can check email and look up simple things quickly, and they’re small enough to carry in your shirt pocket.

PDA/phones, like Pocket PC Phone editions. They can show a little bigger picture than a smart phone, but they’re too big to carry in a shirt pocket and too big for a small purse.

Small laptops. Very portable, able to do anything you can do on a desktop PC, but pretty expensive ($2000 and up).

Big laptops like my Toshiba M4. A full-blown desktop experience, but when you carry one with a charger and a few accessories, you need a big bag full of heavy stuff just to get any work done.

Due to this broad range of options, most people pick one or more “sweet spots” that feel good to them. A typical (non-geek) person won’t use all four of the devices mentioned above. And at the other extreme, only the biggest geek would use just one device and, say, make phone calls from a laptop. Instead, we each pick a sweet spot on the list above, or two or three. And if you’re really into music or video, you might also have an Ipod or a DVD player, in addition to one or more of the devices listed above.

Now enter the Origami. Origami is simply another choice, one that appears in the exact center of the list above. It’s a true Windows XP computer (with a Vista version coming next, of course) that can do everything your laptop or DVD player can do. But you can carry it in one hand, and it fits easily in a purse or a slim briefcase.

Origami is a real PC, which means it can run real software. Photoshop CS, for instance (sorry, Bill and Steve). Like many people who love to take photographs, I use Photoshop every day, and Origami is simply the smallest, handiest device that I can actually use Photoshop CS on. I could throw one in my camera bag, and be able to download pictures (it has a built-in compact flash reader) and edit them anywhere, any time.

As a guy who’s in the market for a new cell phone and a new personal laptop, I’m ready for a fresh assessment of which sweet spots sound good to me. And based on everything I’ve seen and tried myself, a tiny smart phone and an Origami (er, Ultra Mobile PC) sound about perfect, given the options available today. The Origami’s not out yet, but smart-phone salesmen of the East Side, start your engines …

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 5:51 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.