Origami Devices Verdict – All Dead On Arrival
After my speculation yesterday, the new Microsoft / Intel Origami / UMPC devices from Samsung, Founder and Asus have broken cover at the CeBIT show in Hanover. All the potential design flaws I mentioned (lack of keyboards, being too big, and looking ugly/undesirable) are, it turns out, present on these devices.
The method of text entry uses an interface designed for touch screens – a so-called Touch Pack interface, with virtual keys laid out on screen in arcs of circles, designed to be tapped by using your thumbs (see pic above). This looks like a poor piece of keypad design: it takes up valuable screen real estate, and obscures the screen while you type; the keypad is physically too large to be comfortable to “thumb”; there is no space around the virtual keys; and it needn’t have been virtual – there is enough spare real esate on the borders of these devices to put a decent keypad, without having to use a virtual keypad on the screen. All of these factors will combine to make data entry both difficult and error-prone. But even if you don’t understand very much about how people interact with devices, is it that hard to learn lessons from the successful Blackberry mobile devices?
The bottom line, then, is that I’m afraid that my intial thoughts have been confirmed: these devices really do appear to be dead on arrival. In my opinion, hardly anyone – except a handful of gadget early-adopters – is going to want one of these.
stuart wrote:
I agree with you on this – the devices are ugly with big black borders around them. You would think that other companies would learn from Apple’s cool design – how is it that Apple is the only company that can achieve good design.
The devices also have poor battery life and are too big to carry around in your pocket – I don’t see the point. I blogged the same thing here: http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz/2006/03/09/origami-project-revealed-as-umpc/
Cheers – Stuart
Posted 09 Mar 2006 at 10:13 am ¶
simon wrote:
Stuart, clearly, the designs of these devices are compromised by the constraints of making them small, while also achieving sub-$1000 (USD) price-points. I suspect that the difference between Apple and the Microsoft/Intel/Hardware partner type consortia is that Steve Jobs understands what good design is, and thinks it’s super-important. In the other group, some of the people know what good design is; but the decision makers don’t believe it’s super-important.
Posted 09 Mar 2006 at 10:36 am ¶
stuart wrote:
Yeah – I’ve been checking out Technorati to get a feel for the uptake, and it’s seems to be a fifty-fifty split at the moment. There’s more than a few bloggers who empatically want one, but I don’t think they know why they want them. There’s also lots of others who see past the hype and are posting negative comments on the device.
Posted 09 Mar 2006 at 10:46 am ¶
simon wrote:
The lack of imagination in the design of these devices is pretty amazing. The design process appears to have been, “Let’s just copy the designs from the MS Portable Media Center” (pic @ http://dpnow.com/archives/13May04.Creative.jpg ). That’s an amazing design decision because I don’t think anyone actually bought a Portable Media Center device, did they?
Posted 09 Mar 2006 at 11:18 am ¶