The UMPC is Dead

Just as the title states, I believe the UMPC is dead. The age of these fine mobile products with weird names (Samsung Q1 Ultra Ultra Mobile PC) is coming to an end. There are still some stragglers left behind still making a couple products but beyond that they are fighting a losing battle.

The original concept of the UMPC (or the Origami project as it was originally) was to have a portable, low-cost computer. Well companies sort of hit the "portable" aspect but they were far from the "low-cost" part, especially when they launched. The prices of these devices were $1000+, hardly something I would pick over a full sized laptop for that price, unless I REALLY needed something portable.

The first generation of UMPC's were all slates running Windows XP Tablet (mostly) and had passive 7" touch screen. The result of this was when everyone tried to write they would get vectoring. To top that off the OS was hardly mature enough to make use of the inking and touch screen. All of this combined with the high price resulted in what I can only believe as poor sales.

Now the second generation comes in and most devices now include a keyboard of some kind whether it be a thumb board on the Samsung Q1 Ultra or a small convertibale computer such as the Fujitsu U810. Still many people complained about not being able to type well for whatever reason (speed, comfortablity, etc.) and still companies could not get the price down to a satisfactory rate.

One such company did, Wibrain, with its $500 entry price which looked good to many consumers. I can only imagine that their first iteration into the market was a success to say the least as they will be releasing their new Wibrain L1 with an atom processor and other such additions.

Not all companies learned from previous mistakes and thus repeated them into a new product. One such is the Wilicom D4 which is A) Expensive at $1200 and B) Has a battery life of 1.5 hours. Jenn over at Pocketables currently has the device and through her use of it shows that it does perform well, but how can anything be "Ultra Mobile" with a 1.5 hour battery life.

There are still many, many more reasons as to how the UMPC has failed as a product but I am not going to get into that. I just decided to highlight some key concepts that showed the reasoning behind my opinion. I had hoped that the UMPC would suceed but they were easily beaten out by low cost netbooks, which doesn't appeal to me at all. There are MID's that will be coming out but I think that they will suffer the same fate as the UMPC. For now though I will continue to use my niche product and enjoy it thoroughly.

Sidenote - The OQO was released before the UMPC category was "created" so to speak so I believe they will still continue producing products long after.