Well everyone knows all about the over hyped evil Origami PR and marketing campaign. And no I am not going to talk about that. All I will say is next time don't over hype things, it just leads to disappointment and extremely high expectations from users which have no foundation! What I am going to talk about here are a few potential issues that we should be considering with battery, CPU and screen limited devices such as the UMPC.
The issues that will arise with Ultra Mobile PC's (UMPC's) that will need to be addressed are very similar in many senses to the Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices. But it works on XP I hear you say! Well actually that is a benefit! However there are still issues that XP doesn't think about in it's underlying platform. Firstly it was never really designed for low powered systems and as such doesn't mange it's power as efficiently as Windows CE. So why did Microsoft choose it... Well I can only speculate that it makes the platform more accessible to the standard applications developer and cut down the time to market for getting the basic features needed for a quick uptake on the device. Maybe someone from Microsoft could confirm this or update us on these details.
The issues with screen size, orientation and real-estate have always been some of the key HCI issues with PPC and Windows Mobile devices and I for one know that there are resources out there to guide the standard developer to design usable interfaces for such devices. One thing I want to remind the devs is that dockable controls are very clever and if you use them then you should hopefully not have to re-design interfaces for the smaller screen. Keep things simple for the user. The input methods are important to the user... they don't like to spend a long time inputting data so make it easy for your users... give them the options of keyboard or the on screen input but minimise actual input where you can!
With the UMPC think about memory, power and CPU utilisation. it is good development practice at the end of the day. If developers at the moment start thinking about power utilisation with this device and maybe even with laptops when doing their development work then they may actually find that they can use the device for longer. I for one know that my laptop only has a set amount of power on battery and really it is not usable for prolonged time periods. Bear this in mind, you don't want to lose data at the end of the day!!!
Something I have to say at this point is that the above are only my personal guidelines (ie I have put these up here for me so that I remember that when I do get to design for this sort of device I remember these key facts!) and that I don't yet have one of these funky new devices to play with and find out the full limitations of them. If I did have one who knows what other useful things i could find out and advise on. :)