Carrypad and Origamiportal announcement.

As announced in the Origamiportal.com podcast, Carrypad will be taking over Origamiportal.com. Here are the details of the deal and some thoughts about the future for the two portals.

Roy and Matt have done a brilliant job over the last 10 months to set-up, operate and grow what is now the biggest independent ultra mobile PC forum on the ‘net. They’ve put in a lot of time on their podcasts, work on backgrounds for Origami UMPCs and a huge amount of effort to help people in the forums. Well done lads. I know they were keen to push Origamiportal further but just don’t have the time to do that so we have agreed on a way to hand over Origamiportal so that I can put the effort required into it while Matt and Roy can continue to be associated and help with the site when they have time.
For the time being, there won’t be many changes but you will see me start to move news reporting on to Origamiportal while I keep the Carrypad blog/journal as my personal UMPC-related blog. During CES, Origamiportal will be the first place that I will report news as it happens so make sure you have the news feed configured in your rss reader. I will also cross-link to the Carrypad product database so that readers can instantly get specifications on products as I report on them.
I am also going to open up the scope of Origamiportal to cover the same definition of UMPC as on Carrypad. That is, Ultra Mobile PC’s from 5″ to 10″ screen size regardless of whether they are Origami related or not. I think it’s important that potential customers see all options open to them and that means reporting on all of the products throughout the range. To reflect this, there will be a name change in early 2007 to UMPCportal.com

One element I will be spending a lot of time on is the forum. This is the most important element of UMPCportal.com and I want to make sure we enhance this and continue to welcome anyone interested in learning and sharing information about Ultra Mobile PC’s. The members there have been really good in helping others and I know this will continue.

I’ve been running Carrypad on my own for 10 months now and its been a busy time. With UMPCportal and other projects coming  up (yes there’s more coming up in the near future that I can’t talk about at the moment.) I’ll be looking for news contributors, reviewers and support people during 2007 so if you’d like to get involved with what I believe will be the biggest and best UMPC-focused information portal, drop me a line.

Finally, thanks to the incredible number of visitors to both Carrypad and Origamiportal during 2006. Considering that ultra mobile PC didn’t exactly hit big-time during the year, its been encouraging to see so many people wanting to read and share information about them. Thanks to everyone who sent tips in, everyone participating in comments and forums and to all the manufacturers, distributors and resellers that sent news or products.

2006 saw the start of an important new segment in computing. I know I’m one of the few people that believe this at the moment but I have no hesitation in saying that I think the home notebook PC market is going to give a lot of ground to this new class of device. The Multi-use Ultra Mobile and modular PC. Highly personalised mini-PCs with always on cellular Internet capability, multiple input/output options and grab-and-go docking capability make so much sense and in 5 years time we’ll wonder why we ever carried 2kg of keyboard-tethered non-touchscreen PC around!

Good luck to all players in this market. Keep driving forward for your customers.

Steve.