Origami Experience 2.0: right software for the wrong device?
Just an opinion here as I read various observations on how slow Origami Experience 2.0 is running for some people. While it appears from commenters that you can run this software on non-UMPC devices, I started thinking about this today purely from a UMPC perspective, since that’s the target device for the software. Right then is when it truly hit me: it was optimally created for devices that don’t really exist in any large quantity.
Hear me out on this and follow along for a second. The majority ofIntel-powered UMPCs sold in 2006, 2007 and 2008 run on just a fewprocessors with these speeds: 600/800 MHz for the A100/A110 CPUs, 900MHz for the Intel Celerons and 1.0 GHz for the Pentium M. There’s a few1.33 GHz Core Solo units like I have, but they’ve only been out a fewmonths. For sake of argument, let’s forget aboutthe VIA-powered devices momentarily. It’s a safe assumption thatmost Intel-powered UMPCs then are in the first two classes I mentioned,meaning the majority run at 600-, 800- or 900- MHz. I won’t put anumber on what the percentage is, but I’m comfortable with saying themajority are running at under 1 GHz. We could even say half do and halfdon’t if you want. And the RAM in most of those UMPCs? 512 MB isgenerally the standard, although we’ve seen some UMPCs come with 1 GBof RAM and of course, it’s generally easy to upgrade, butagain, I’d bet money that 512 MB of RAM is more common capacity in the UMPCs outthere.
Now let’s look at the recommended system requirements for the OrigamiExperience 2.0. You officially need Vista. The recommendedsystem requirements for the supported Vista editions call for 1 GHzprocessors and 1 GB of RAM. The one Vista edition that has a slightly lower system recommendation? Vista Home Basic drops the RAM recommendation to 512 MB, but you lose the Tablet PC functionality in that one, and it doesn’t officially support OE 2.
So here’s the situation. I like the software, although at first, I didn’t find it intuitive when trying to configure tiles or even to shut the app down. Still, it can be pretty handy for a touchscreen UMPC running Vista. The problem as I see it: only a portion of a niche device class is really able to run it in a way where the user experience is as positive as the developers wanted. Most devices in the target user-base don’t meet the recommended specifications and therefore the user experience suffers. I will go out on a limb here and say that less than half of the folks that install OE 2.0 on a true "Origami-class" UMPC will actually keep it on their device. Whichever side you fall in on, let me know in the comments, because I’m curious.
I’m was here scratching my head as I read comment after comment on various sites where folks with UMPCs are complaining about the performance and my (arguably flawed) thought process above tells me why, In any case, if you’ve tweaked Vista enough so that it runs reasonably well on your UMPC, I suspect the Origami Experience 2.0 will run reasonably well also. I have read several comments about it not running well on VIA-based devices and all I can figure is that perhaps the graphics requirements are a tad much for that hardware solution. I can’t say for sure as I currently don’t have a VIA-powered UMPC to test with.
You are 100% right.
You actually have the one and only umpc which could run it nicely…
OX 2 would have been super 2 years ago on XP.. but bow it’s just sad…
btw. I tested with 1,2Ghz VIA with 1G ram…. hopeless..
but NOW it’s just sad…
It seems fine on my Lenovo X61t tablet, but haven’t used it much and don’t use outlook. Of course my ThinkPad is very powerful compared to most UMPCs. (Yes, it seems to work fine and was no problem to download either, despite not having Origami 1 on my tablet before.)
Microsoft traditionally follows the philosophy that they will build software to do what it should do, and the hardware will catch up “soon”. I’m pretty sure that, besides the difficulty of software performance tuning, they must be following the same philosophy here.
I have the Samsung Q1P with 2 GB RAM running Vista pretty well. But I have 2 issues with OE2:
1. I can’t get the Picture Password to change to my desired picture, its defaulted to the sea creatures picture. The wizard stops at the last step, hitting the ‘finish’ button does nothing.
2. OE2 can’t customize the programs page into different sections like in OE1. The ‘more programs’ is merely a long list of my frequently used programs.
I installed it on my P1610 (1.2 Ghz Core Solo & 1Gb of RAM), used it once and uninstalled it. I probably wouldn’t have used it anyway but I was amazed at how slowly it ran. Just starting Origami Central caused an enormous amount of disk thrashing and when I opened Music it decided to scan my network for any shared libraries which meant loading playlists was horrible.
I can’t understand why what is effectively an app launcher needs to be so slow and I couldn’t imagine using this on a UMPC.
It’s a total waste of time besides the auto changing of some of the sidebars to actually make them touch friendly. This would have been exciting years ago.
Origami works fine so far on my Fujitsu P1620. But the P1620 has a Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM. So it has far more firepower than the average UMPC.
Its working both on my Q1 Ultra EL and on my Gateway CX2620 tablet PC. Not had much ti,e to play around with it on the Q1 as I’m out of town in addition to lots of online classes but its kinda neat on my CX. One exception though, I get a unexpected shutdown error dialog which if I click close, closes OE2. If I ignore it and move it out of the way, everything seems to work. I may try reinstalling it.
David
Just another sad example of MS losing their way.Vista is not bad;just so slow on all but the speediest gear. And via plus vista-i’ve seen paint dry more quickly. MS needs to control the user experience including matching the hardware and softwsre more effectively.
It works some what ok on my Q1 1GHz 1GB Ram. I’m going to rebuild my lifebook P1510D 1.2GHZ 1GB RAM (and a MoGo BT adapter) with Vista and finally go all vista for my tablet needs.
I have it running on my Asus R2hv, but it’s slow… And it crashes everytime I try to use the stylus. Don’t think I would be using it much even if it worked. Opera is a much better browser for UMPC’s than IE withc is embedded in Oe 2.0.
It works well on a UX380N. The only problem is that I don’t really see the point of Origami Experience. I liked the weather gadget in the Now screen, but that was really about it.
Origami 2.0 is completely useless on every OQO I’ve tried it on.
Instead of building software to help people get more out of their machines, Microsoft has built a bloated piece of ‘prettyware’ that offers no real functionality.
I gave OE2 a try on my Q1U-EL (800MHz, 1gig RAM) and once I turned off every bit of Vista shine, making it look an awful lot like Windows 2000, everything but video worked pretty well. I agree with Kevin’s assessment that the devices just aren’t up to handling the overhead a flashy front-end brings about. It’s really a shame, the Q1U is a nicely designed and decently functional little device, but Vista holds it back from being a great one.
On the slow side on my Lenovo x60t.
Also the outlook integration does not work.
The browser is nice for touch browsing but otherwise … meh.
I would love to use THAT interface on old laptops setup as internet only machines (e.g. for XP and maybe even 98se).
OX2 came pre-installed on my Shift. I have not yet thoroughly tested it and I have removed it from the startup folder as I didn’t want it to always come up when I boot Vista.
What I wanted to use it for so far was browsing the web. In theory the included browser (which is based on IE7) makes much better use of the screen real estate than IE7.
I have just one major grief with the browser and therefor have gone back to using IE7 (and probably soon will install FF3 or Opera): Many websites open additional browser windows to display search results etc. The OX2 browser just displays a blank white screen and stops doing anything if java script is used or actually opens the new content in the original window. What happened to multiple browser windows or tabbed browsing? IMHO this is a major bug that MS would need to fix before OX2 becomes usable for web browsing (at least for me because I do not want to use different browsers depending on whether I suspect a website will open another window).