Well, if you’re reading some gaming related news websites out there, you might have heard of a project by Microsoft by the name “Origami”. It’s rumored to be a PSP’esque mobile entertainment platform with multimedia content, games and all that stuff. Honestly, rumors like that were flying around for ages that MS would finally try to get into the portable gaming biz with a portable Xbox. Some of these rumors say, that it’s got a touchscreen, high-res … basically a TabletPC, but a little bit more portable with gaming controls. Not to forget GPS support.
I’d have no problem with MS joining the mobile gaming party simply because competition is always good. I don’t know if that’s really that case, but at least since the PSP got announced Nintendo showed some real innovation with the DS, pushing the whole gaming thing more and more into a direction, where basically anyone could find something he/she likes.
But even if Project Origami is not a real gaming machine, it might be really nice. At least, if it’s somehow closed to what can be seen in a movie I found Kotaku. You see everything, from portable media player, to web-tablet, to gaming machine.
According to Microsoft Watch the Redmonders have been working on such a device for quite some time now and actually planed to give it a battery which could support your mobile activity for a whole day. Not bad, since this is in my opinion a mojor problem mobile entertainment currently has. Just think about the battery life of the PSP. It’s somehow described there as an ultra-portable TabletPC, which would go hand in hand with the Flash movie linked above. Around 10inches? In my opinion this is still a little bit too large for mobile entertainment, since it would be just another 2 inches to have your PowerBook with you. Microsoft Watch also somehow pulled it into the direction of being maybe a competition to the Video IPod. Well, if we’re really talking about a 10" device, I can nearly guarantue, that I’d never use it for mobile music stuff, simply because it’s too large. Hell, I’m now thinking for more than 2 months about getting a Nano and holding back basically, because it’s still larger than my iAudio G3 ;)
On the other hand, a device like the PSP or the N770 simply have a quite limited spectrum of what you can do on and with them simply because their resolution isn’t high enough to support things like word processing above the most basic levels.
Also if MS is really going to promote this new device for outdoor and truely mobile use, they better give it a good display. Something that stays readable also under normal daytime conditions and that also is somehow scratch-protected (unlike the PSP’s screen for example).
But enough of the speculating, which I should better leave to people out there, who have direct or indirect ties and wires to MS ;) I guess, the world will know more on the 2nd.
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