Today OrigamiProject.com has announced Origami 2.0 the software interface for UMPCs. If you’ve used the original Origami you’ll be able to recall that it is a software interface that ran on Vista equipped UMPCs. Origami aimed to be the all in one center for the UMPC user putting images, music, and videos right at their fingertips. However looking at images, listening to music, and watching videos isn’t the only thing people do on their UMPCs, and Origami 2.0 hopes to become more useful through the use of additional apps and tools within Origami itself. New applications announced include:

• Origami Central - the new Origami interface, updated from Origami 1.0, the Origami team claims to have a fully optimized UMPC internet browser and RSS feed reader built into Origami 2.0
• Origami Now - A central home like screen which gives you Vista ‘Gadget’ like mini applications that offer data at a glance, such as weather, news, and traffic.
• Picture Password - A new way to login to your UMPC, you can select a custom image, and set a password by touching certain points of the image. By repeating the touch points on the image your password will be entered and you will have access to the UMPC. This should result in a much faster login than having to type in a string of characters.

The Origami Team Blog says that this is just a preview of things to come and that more screenshots and information is on its way. My only hopes are that it will run on any machine and not just those that the software declares to be a “UMPC”. An XP implementation would be nice as well. Click through to see a few more screenshots.
[Origami Project] via [jkkmobile]

The guys over at GottaBeMobile have grabbed a press release which tells us that OQO will be demoing a Model 02 with built in WiMAX connecting to Sprints “Xohm” WiMAX network, and they are calling it the first UMPC to do so. Read the whole release over at GottaBeMobile.com.

Following in the footsteps of the Japanese UX92 the OQO 02 can now be equipped with a 64GB SSD which will lighten your wallets load by approximately $1000 in addition to the rest OQO 02’s price. Other new options will include the ability to equip your OQO 02 with an improved outdoor display (another $200) which is said to reduce reflectivity by 50% over the previous screens, however there is no increase in brightness. All of this can be yours for a mere $3000.
[Engadget] via [UMPCPortal]

The Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium UMPC has been officially launched at CES. It is picking up the same 1.33Ghz Core Solo (U1500) as included with the UX380 and UX390. The unit will also include a 6 cell battery, 1GB of RAM, an 80GB HDD and come pre-installed with Windows XP Tablet Edition. Another nice upgrade will be a supposedly improved split keyboard. The whole lot will be priced beginning at $1399 with the model name NP-Q1U/P01 and prices of previous Q1U models will be reduced.

[UMPCPortal]

From the REDFLY web page:
“The REDFLY Mobile Companion is a sleek clamshell design that includes an 8″ display, a full function keyboard, and a touchpad mouse. Measuring just 1×6x9 inches and only 2 pounds, the REDFLY Mobile Companion offers over 8 hours of battery life and boots instantly! It also adds three new features - instant VGA output, access to USB flash drives, and the ability to charge your smartphone via USB.”

The REDFLY is an amazing piece of technology. “It wirelessly extends the smartphone to a larger display, full keyboard, mouse and USB ports. Any application on the smartphone is shown instantly on the new display without modification or synchronization.” All it takes is an Interface Driver, loaded on the Smartphone without any additional configuration. That’s pretty amazing when you consider how little processing power a Smartphone posesses.

It’s a “laptop adjunct” for a smartphone, not a laptop carrier for a handtop, but does it point the way to things to come? If Celiocorp thinks there was enough of a market for such a device to extend a smartphone, why wouldn’t Sony, OQO, or another UMPC manufacturer see the benefits?

The REDFLY should cost about $500. That may be a bit steep for a laptop adjunct for a Smartphone when a laptop costs just a bit more and gives a lot more functionality. However, if such a device were developed for UMPCs, it would be cheaper and easier than buying a separate laptop and synching, swapping USB sticks, or some other method of duplicating data files.

Here is Micro PC Talk wishing you the best and safest of holidays, may all your gadget dreams come true!

Yeggster from the MPCT forums has opened up the UX’s dock, also know as the Port Replicator, and managed to fix himself a nice vertical VGA output in place of the standard one that sticks right out the back of the unit. The original VGA plug was left intact and even still works. Yeggster has kindly documented the process and put up images and lots of info over at the Wiki.

Head on over to GottaBeMobile.com to nominate your favorite UMPC for the 2007 GottaBeMobile awards. There are a few stipulations before you cast your vote so be sure to read through them first. Nominations for best Tablet PC and Best Software are open as well so don’t hesitate to vote. Nominations can be cast through December 31, and the winners will be announced in January.

I’ve spent a lot of time compiling data from the UX benchmark thread so we can really get an idea of how the different UX models compare to each other. While none of this is guaranteed to be 100% accurate, it should give you a good visual representation of how they stack up to one another. Before we get into the benchmark results, lets look at all the different models and their specs. The models here are arranged from newest to oldest release -

Take special notice that the UX490 is using the newer Core 2 Solo CPU and not the previous Core Solo versions. Also before we being, I’d like to mention that the benchmark program used for all of these results was Crystal Mark. As I said before, these test results and comparisons will not be completely accurate, unfortunately I don’t have all that much data for certain models. In some cases if there were any discrepancies in the test, they won’t have averaged out. Though I still feel like we have enough content to get a clear picture of the performance of each model, and I really wanted to get this up on the front page to people can make more informed purchasing decisions. Now what you have all been waiting for - prepare for incoming barrage of graphs!

Vista is quite clearly the determining factor in this OpenGL test. The UX380, UX390, and UX490 are all running Vista, and it doesn’t seem to handle OpenGL nearly as well as XP.

I still haven’t been able to get the exact model of SSD used by the UX490, but I thought it would be the same as the UX390’s. Either it is an upgraded model, or the Core 2 Solo can handle the SSD better than the Core Solo. As you can see the UX490’s SSD performed quite a bit better than the UX390’s.

As one would assume, all the 1GB models performed very similarly. We see a small jump in performance when going from the UX180’s 512MB of RAM to the other models.

Surprisingly all of the models performed very similarly to one another in the FPU area which is a test of processing speed. Its unclear whether or not the upgraded CPU’s on the UX380 (U1500), UX390 (U1500), and UX490 (U2200) have the same FPU performance as the UX180 and UX280 (both U1400). Its quite possible that they have such close scores because Vista dragged the scores of the UX380, UX390, and UX490 down.

Arithmetic Logic unit is a more basic processing test. As one would expect, there is an increase in the score of the most recent three models which use faster processors, it is also possible that the difference between the oldest two models and the newest three would be even greater if we were comparing one XP unit to another.

Many people want to know what kind of performance increase or decrease you’d see going from the 1.33GHz Core Solo U1500 (equipped on the 380 and 390) to the 1.2GHz Core 2 Solo U2200 (on the 490). While I haven’t been able to do a hands on test of both machines I can say that the Core 2 Solo at very least should match the Core Solo in it’s performance. It should have a somewhat greater performance, but unfortunately I don’t have enough 490 data to represent that on the graphs. In addition to the matched or better performance that the Core 2 Solo has over the Core Solo, it should consume somewhat less power. The Core 2 Solo has more advanced power saving options, and most of the new technologies that come with the Core 2 Duo line, whereas the older Core Solo represents the technology that came with the Core Duo processors.There were a few more graphs that I didn’t put up because I didn’t have the expertise to talk about them, so for those of you interested here is a graph containing all of the tests.