Hardware and Software Specs
 Image copyright © 2006 Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399 U.S.A. All rights reserved. The Samsung Q1 UMPC |
In one report, Bill Mitchell said, "The touch-enhanced display can be used as an on-screen QWERTY keyboard [using Dial Keys] to navigate, or users can employ a stylus to input handwritten information. They can also input content with a traditional keyboard, linked either by USB port or wireless Bluetooth connectivity."
Not all implementations of all UMPCs will have Bluetooth ports, but the initial crop of vendors have promised this, along with support for various USB and BT keyboards. This is very similar to the tablet PCs that are currently on the market: some come with keyboards and all offer support for either pen or keyboard input devices.
Other input ports are planned for the devices, including:
- Wired Ethernet and WiFi networking connectors
- Compact Flash card slots
- USB v 2.0 ports
- An external VGA monitor port
- Various buttons and connectors for audio operations
- Support for stereo microphones with built-in noise reduction and echo cancellation
- A remote control for the Media Center PC application
Microsoft's goal was to use off-the-shelf displays that are in common consumer electronics devices to keep the costs down. They settled on seven-inch VGA displays that had 800 x 480 native resolution and can handle 800 x 600 with some loss of quality.
"The form factor was based around a 7-inch display panel, a size that is currently a standard size in the electronics industry due to broad adoption of that size display in the portable DVD player and automotive markets," said Microsoft's Otto Berkes in a newspaper interview. "Why use some new custom size when a potentially good one already exists?"
These plans for the UMPC differ from the existing Motion Computing tablets. The Motion displays use high-contrast, non-glare, active digitizers, meaning that the pen sold with the tablet is the only way to enter information. The UMPC displays are general touchscreens that can work with a finger or any other object for input. "We designed our 8.4-inch display to meet the needs of legacy enterprise applications, because many of these applications are designed for SVGA (800 x 600) resolution," said Bert Haskell, a product manager for Motion Computing. The UMPC displays are designed for showing widescreen movies.
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 Images copyright © 2006 Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399 U.S.A. All rights reserved. Top and side views of the Samsung Q1 UMPC, showing some of the ports and the power switches |
One of the biggest issues for any portable device is how it uses power and whether its batteries can run an entire eight-hour day without having to be recharged. While the UMPC is still too new to determine whether this will be the case, there are several indications from Microsoft staff and from analysts that it will be a very power-hungry device. Part of the problem is that 7-inch screen, which consumes a great deal of power. Microsoft is aiming for at least a two-hour battery profile, but early testers say that even that amount of time will be hard to deliver. This means that batteries won't be able to last as long as watching your average movie on the UMPC.
Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research wrote in his blog, "What is missing? Battery life. Right now these machines really need to be sold with a higher capacity battery if you're going to use one as a life style device going through the day."
There are numerous notebooks available today that offer three or more hours of battery life, including ones from Sony, Fujitsu and Motion Computing. Of course, these are all larger form factors and thus able to have bigger batteries included to last longer.
To counteract this issue, Microsoft has tried to finesse things by offering more advanced power management on the UMPC. Like many of today's more advanced multimedia laptops, the unit will have a special quick boot sequence that will bring up an embedded OS to run movies or play music files.
Dustin Hubbard at Microsoft writes in his blog, "The Samsung unit actually has 2 boot modes on a 3 way power switch - On, Off and AVS Multimedia (that's their name for this mode). AVS Multimedia can do near instant on by booting into what appears to be XP Embedded (as far as I can tell that is what they are doing) and allows you to play movies, music and photos without requiring you to boot into full XP. That gives you 2 advantages; presumably better battery life by not having so many services running in the background and fast cold boot startup for media only consumption."
Touch Pack
Microsoft has developed a special series of operating system enhancements to the tablet OS to take advantage of the UMPC platform. Called the "Touch Pack," these enhancements will optimize the touch screen experience. It has five applications: a program launcher, a series of touch improvements to the normal Windows UI, a Brilliant Black skin for Media player, a Sudoku game, and Dial Keys, a thumb-based on-screen keyboard for inputting text.
"Currently the Touch Pack is available only to UMPC qualified computers and only as an OEM pre-install," says Hubbard. "The Touch Pack was designed specifically for small form factor PCs."
Microsoft's Mitchell says, "Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows XP software optimizes the touch screen user interface for UMPCs to simplify navigation and ease-of-use while on the go. The Touch Pack's customizable Program Launcher organizes software programs into categories, and uses large buttons and icons to make it easy to find and open your favorite applications."
Most of the marketing materials that show screen shots of the UMPC feature views of this application.
 Image copyright © 2006 Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399 U.S.A. All rights reserved. The Touch Pack program launcher |
There are several components to the Touch Pack. The first one is "Touch Improvements." This utility makes about 10 different settings changes to Windows such as widening the scroll bars and enlarging the minimize and maximize buttons, shows folders in thumbnail view. Next is a new skin for Windows Media Player called "Brilliant Black." This skin fills the screen on the devices with large buttons to navigate the media controls such as play, stop and volume.
 Image copyright © 2006 Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399 U.S.A. All rights reserved. Touch Pack's DialKeys |
The third Touch Pack program is "DialKeys." This program, built by Fortune Fountain Ltd., is a way to input text with your thumbs. Dial Keys makes it easy to enter URLs, e-mail addresses, et cetera.
"DialKeys basically takes a standard QWERTY keyboard layout and splits it in two halves. It's a little hard to describe the layout but there are lots of screen shots of DialKeys to show what it looks like. The basic idea is that you hold the device in two hands and use your thumbs on the screen to type in text. It takes a little getting used to, but people are always amazed once they use it a day or two how good they get at typing with it," says Hubbard on his blog.
 Image copyright © 2006 Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399 U.S.A. All rights reserved. Touch Pack's Sudoku |
The final product in the Touch Pack is a Sudoku game. The version is optimized for touch and the pen.
Next, we'll look at who will be manufacturing the UMPC and how much it's likely to cost.
