What a pleasure it was to have a few minutes (well it seemed like a few minutes) to take a look back at UMPCs from 2006-2010 at the Techlounge last week. If you want to know where the roots of the consumer-focused tablet are look no further than the Origami project. Others had done tablets before but Microsoft, Intel, VIA and a few manufacturers and brands did research from 2004 that resulted in the consumer-focused UMPC. While the research was correct (hat tip to Otto Berkes, wherever he is) the results, as products, were too big and lacked adequate software. Hey, It wasn’t until 3 versions of Windows later that it gained an internet-focused ‘share’ option! Perhaps the initial buzz was too much but there was certainly a craving for something out there. Origamiportal, the former name of this site, rose to 1.4 million page views per month until 2010 when Apple launched the iPad and took over the market. Intel never gave up and today we’ve got UMPCs costing just $99.
Sascha and Chippy look back at the UMPCs
Take a look at the video for a fun look back at 2006-2010 and some inside stories.
oh the memories!
back in the days i used the hell out of my HP Jornada 520 (Pocket-PC-Thingy) with a stowaway folding-keyboard i was even able to write complex documents or play gameboy-games on emulator (well.. without keyboard was possible too, but it only registered 2 buttons at once, so pokemon was ok, zeld wasn’t)
it was a great device. bought it used in about ~ 2002-2003 for small money and used it over the next 3-4 years as my primary mobile computer.
sure, you had _no_ internal storage (16MB), so you needed CF-Cards (and since those only came in 2-4 GB you needed more than one) and it had no Wifi, so you needed _more_ CF-Cards but… whow.. it did _everything_
MP3-Player, Gameboy, Network-Tools, ICQ-Client, Remote-Control for my media-player… it did everything my smartphone does now.
ah.. the good old days.
Frankly i would love to see OEMs revisiting some of the UMPC designs, but with updated internals.
I am so tired of the all screen “touch” devices.
What a great video! I remember craving the Everun:D
Great memories from those days, It’s really amazing how my life at that time use to revolve around Windows, UMPC’s, & of course netbooks. But has changed almost entirely over to phones, tablets, mini desktops (Android/iOS/ChromeOS/Windows).
It’s especially hard because over the course of just a few years as mainstream computing was shifting away from Windows & over to other platforms I unexpectedly lost multiple family members. It has been a traumatic shock & just makes it incredibly hard to enjoy anything anymore. If I could only go back…
great memories! had an Everun (too slow for youtube) no hardware acceleration, but Wibrain was a little bit more decent in terms of speed….glad that I have an Asus t100 and Dell Venue pro 8 now.Oh, how technology progressed…
Also not featured: The tiny sony vaio (p?), and the libretto with two 7inch screens. There’s just not much form factors to go around sub10inches anymore, convertible laptops get all the fun, everything else is just a slate