At the Maker Faire today, I visited the UMPC Experience Area in the Microsoft section of the Faire. When I arrived, there were only a few attendees near the UMPCs, so I got to spend about 20 minutes with the TabletKiosk eo prototype. Later, I spent a few minutes with the Founder and Samsung prototypes. I did not try the ASUS. Near the end of the day, I attended a 30 minute presentation on the UMPCs.

• All 3 devices seemed responsive and not sluggish at all during my interactions.
• The Touch Pack program launcher is very pleasant.
• DialKeys will take some getting used to, but I think it will be only slightly less usable than the treo keyboard.
• Attendees seemed a little skeptical, but impressed.
• The Founder UMPC is really thin compared to the Samsung and eo.
• I agree with JK when he says that you can rest your hand on the screen without it interfering with your writing. That’s nice!
• The screen zooming is faster than I expected and much more readable than I expected, although several control panels (touch optimizations, system) become blank grey windows at the scaled 1024 resolution.
• Browsing the web with the UMPC form factor was great.
• I like the touch point mouse embedded in the eo. I’m guessing that some old DirectX full screen games won’t respond well to the touch screen, so an external mouse or a touch point is going to be useful in those cases. The Samsung doesn’t have a similar feature.

The portrait mode, dual microphones, stereo speakers, CF slot and Ethernet port are clear advantages for the Samsung over the eo. The eo’s cradle option and touchpoint are its advantages. I don’t know how the 900mhz Celeron M (Samsung) compares to the 1 Ghz Via C7 Nano (eo) and I don’t know how the two graphics chipsets compare. If anyone has that information, please speak up. Also, there is no confirmation on the US price and date for the Samsung Q1.

For now, I’m really happy with my eo preorder. If the Samsung is a lot faster and only slightly more expensive, then I will be really bummed.

Update: I missed Robert Scoble at the Faire. Too bad – I would have congratulated him in person for being absolutely right about the UMPC.

LuckyThoughts.com has a link to the FCC documents for the eo UMPC/Origami device. Samsung’s Q1 FCC docs were posted by Engadget. As I mentioned earlier, I purchased my eo through AllTP.com. It should arrive before the end of this month and I can’t wait to start fooling around with it!!

jk has a pre-production eo UMPC and is preparing a review.

Richard Morton is considering making his OrigamiCar resolution independant so it can work on screens other that 800 x 480. Seems like a no-brainer to me. The only reason the UMPCs have that resolution is because it would be more expensive to use a higher res 7″ screen. Next year’s models might easily have a much bigger resolution while maintaining the same size and a lower price tag.

Check out the discussion in the comments section of Chris Pratley’s OneNote 2007/UMPC post. Veteran OneNote users are chiming in on how they think the UMPC form factor will handle OneNote. Chris mentions a ‘minimal ui’ mode for OneNote that should definitely help! I asked our resident Tablet PC junky at Homestead, Gordon, and he says the big problem he has with OneNote is that it’s not easy to add indentation and bullets. To me, that sounds like pretty fundamental technology. I hope that’s fixed in OneNote 2007!!

Meanwhile, Lora, in a followup to her Developing for the Ultra-Mobile PC post, pointed to the next steps for UMPC developers, including an emulator and information on the ISV program.