Vikram Madan's Blog: Fun With Windows

Signs of the times

VikramMadan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:32:00 GMT

-~-

VikramMadan — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:31:00 GMT

Somewhere down a yellow brick road ....

UMPC Trippin’

VikramMadan — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 11:00:00 GMT

Just got back from a family-vacation trip to Zion-Byrce-Grand Canyon. [Flew into Vegas, rented a car, drove to St. George Utah, rented an RV, used a RV Park as a base and did lots of great day trips and hikes in canyon country]. My Q1 UMPC has pretty much become my defacto travel machine, especially for personal vacations. Gone are the days of lugging a full-sized laptop around, even though that’s what 1 in 5 people are now doing.

When traveling I keep my Q1 in a little hard-case I snagged from a co-worker. Makes it easy to toss into a backpack without worrying about it getting crushed.

On the flight: In the air, the Q1 becomes our gaming/reading/entertainment machine. I usually keep a bunch of casual games on my Q1, specifically for travel purposes, and can pretty much get my kids to do anything by ‘bribing’ them with a little bit of game timeJ. (Their all-time favorite is Chuzzle which is incredibly touch-friendly, fun to play, and runs marvelously on 800x480). For comparison, we also had a Nintendo DS with us, but the kids typically ended up fighting over the Q1 – presumably because of the larger screen and richer experience. (Take that Nintendo! J) Additionally, I also keep the Q1 loaded with lots of free Microsoft Reader books for catching up on the classics. (Haven’t taken recorded MCE shows yet, but plan to do so for future trips…). For domestic flights, we get plenty of mileage out of the Q1’s extended battery. For longer trans-atlantic flights, I’ve previously carried a car/DC adapter for when the planes have outlets under the seats – else there’s always the option of the external 8-cell power bank.

On the road: The Q1 is a great car passenger device. In addition to the above entertainment options, we also use it for navigation and maps. Here I use Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007 in conjunction with a BT GPS puck. If the vehicle doesn’t have a built-in navigation system, we use it for directions and maps. Even if the car has a navigation system, passengers still get a kick out of tracking progress on long road trips, looking up the names of cities and geological landmarks as we drive by, and generally being able to play with a live map in ways the in-car system doesn’t allow. Because S&T deduces car speed from the GPS signal, the UMPC also becomes great for backseat driving, should you, uhm, choose to want to, say, nag your spouse/driver about staying within the speed limit etc... J. For long road trips, a cheap $20 inverter becomes a great source of worry-free power for the UMPC.

At the destination: Almost everyplace (and apparently most RV parks) now has Wi-Fi (but bandwidth usually sucks) so the UMPC lets you connect to the local community, plan daily outings, and discover local information easily. Personally, I now no longer do much up-front day-to-day vacation planning. Everything is pretty much discoverable online when you get there (and if not, you can always ask a local!). At the end of the day, you can do personal email and catch up with news, etc. I usually keep a foldable USB keyboard stowed somewhere in my luggage for rare occasions that require typing out long emails but mostly never end up using it. (Now if only I could figure out a way to print all the info that I find… J)

Photo/Video Management: Several years ago, I lost my digital camera while vacationing in San Diego and vowed from that point on to always have a laptop for backing up photos. The UMPC works great in this department. Both my Camera and my Q1 natively support CompactFlash cards. At the end of each day, I simply pop the CF card into my Q1 and copy over the pictures & videos. I have Microsoft Digital Suite 2006 (unfortunately now discontinued) installed on my Q1 – which lets me edit, touch-up, and tag the photos right away (there’s never a better time to do this than right away, as I’ve learnt through experience J). I can then do slideshows for the family and/or pass around the Q1 to let everyone view the pics. I can also process the digital movies from my camera using Windows Movie Maker.

Back home: I use SyncToy to conveniently upload all the newly acquired digital content to my home media/backup machine. (If you struggle with maintaining data across your home network, definitely give SyncToy a spin… )

Overall, it’s hard for me to imagine traveling without a UMPC from this point on - the UMPC really spoils you with its portability, convenience, and versatility. Take one on your next vacation. You won’t be disappointed…

***

Post-winHEC Post

VikramMadan — Mon, 21 May 2007 12:59:00 GMT

WinHEC 2007 seems to have gone well. UMPC exposure was pretty-decent. Bill Gates showed off UMPCs in his keynote. I presented a session on UMPCs (somewhat ambiguously titled ‘UMPC Ecosystem’ – I’ll post a link to the slides when they become public) and assisted my colleague Jeremy White on his UMPC ‘chalk talk’ (titled ‘Origami Experience and UMPCs’). Plus we had a UMPC booth at the tech ‘pavilion’ demonstrating several UMPCs to a continuous stream of the enthused, the curious, and the plain ol’ confused. After several days of non-stop reiteration and messaging of the UMPC potential, it was a highpoint to hear a member of the press in the audience speak up and say, “I finally get it – it’s a PC. That’s great. And so much less confusing than the previous messaging”. A similar sentiment was expressed in a nice little follow-up article (worth-reading) by David DeJean (InformationWeek) titled “Ok, So I Was Wrong About Origami”.

[Personal-Lesson-Learnt-Dept.]: Before I went to WinHEC, I had received the standard internal pre-conference ~~warnings~~ guidance to be careful about what I said in such a public setting, and especially about what I said to the press. Despite my initial skepticism (“How bad can it be?” mused the uninitiated author, naïvely…J), I’m sorry to say the advice was spot on. Some of the subsequent press reports I’ve read about my session feel positively surreal (especially as I sit there comparing what it was I said and intended to what it was folks apparently heard and reported…). Even stranger is the bizarre chinese whisper manner in which the reports are evolving, as secondary sites glean material from previous reports and then rehash/rerelease into the ether, introducing genetic drift (aka mutations) in real time. So, if reports are to be believed, in addition to actively giving interviews at WinHEC (which I wasn’t aware I was doing, unless open Q&A countsJ) I also apparently made major formal announcements about future UMPC specifications (and to think I thought I was just talking about what’s possible J)! If you do have an intense desire to read WinHEC reports, Mary Jo (ZDNet) got it largely right and you can kind-of skim this piece by Todd Bishop (Seattle PI). Anything more sensationalist, I advise taking with a pinch of salt…J. [Next time though, no prizes for guessing who’ll be watching what he says like a hawk…J]

Hopefully though, at the end of the day, we made some dent into some of the existing UMPC confusion, made some incremental additions to the overall UMPC momentum, and possibly even won a few new UMPC converts... so all in all, seems to have gone well.

Upcoming WinHEC Conference

VikramMadan — Thu, 10 May 2007 09:03:00 GMT

[Nothing exciting today] Just a quick note that I will be presenting a UMPC session (think 'UMPC 101') at WinHEC in LA next week. If you're attending, do stop by the UMPC pavilion booth and/or attend the session or subsequent 'chalktalk'.

Once we're done with WinHEC I hope to go back to my regularly scheduled programming aka blog-postings :)

Mobile PCs - The Lost Scenarios

VikramMadan — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 06:55:00 GMT

Once upon a time, when I first joined Microsoft, product-creation (at least as I experienced it, on the relatively smaller projects I worked on) seemed like a fairly simple process. Give a problem to a bunch of smart people. Let them brainstorm possible solutions. Pick the subset that makes the most sense. Spec it, build it, test it, ship it, party. During this same period, however, the tech community often joked that it usually took Microsoft 3 versions to get things right. Applied to my personal experiences, this makes a lot of sense: v1 was basically a best-guess of what might be useful; by the time users got their hands on v1, the product team had already moved on to building v2 (comprised largely of ideas that got cut from v1); v3 then was the first release that actually factored in user feedback. And users usually noticed. J

Fast forward to today, where both the physical cost and the opportunity cost of building the wrong software is enormous (and shows no sign of abating). Not only must our products fulfill user needs and expectations while providing real value, but they must also be well-engineered and secure, cater to a global audience, strive to be innovative and delightful, hold their own in an ultra-competitive landscape, be ahead of the curve on technology and social trends, capture mind-share, inspire viral videos on you-tube, be well reviewed by Walt, and not draw the ire of, uhm, *cough*cough*over-zealouscough* regulators. Get it wrong on any one of these fronts, and your chances of becoming technological road-kill just mushroomed. Talk about pressure! J

One positive outcome of all this: I’m happy to observe more and more MS teams spending steadily-increasing amounts of effort in the product-planning and user-research activities that lead up to product-definition decisions. The combination of real data and user input, mixed with deep software-creation experience, sprinkled with broad and innovative thinking, will hopefully propel our products to a new level of value in the future. At least, I live in hope.J

Last year I had the good fortune of participating in some project planning activities related to understanding the future of the Mobile PC in an ever-increasingly-mobile world. Part of this effort involved cataloging new and interesting usage scenarios for Mobile PCs (basically going where no Mobile PC has ever gone before). Given how integral mobility is to all our lives, it was only a short time before we were oozing out of our ears with potential new Mobile PC scenarios. So much so that an important, ground-breaking subset of these scenarios was at risk of getting ‘lost in the crowd’. Thankfully, not only was I able to capture these scenarios before they disappeared, I am now also able to share them with you, the devoted reader:

(PS: For the curious, these scenarios were captured directly on a Tablet PC using the ink-annotation capabilities of PowerPoint 2007)

Scrolling away (the moments that make up a dull day)….

VikramMadan — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 09:37:00 GMT

By now, after having been forum’d, twitter’d, and even youtube’d (Thanks, CTitanic!), the UMPCScrollbar has hopefully found a happy home on all your UMPCs. Curious minds have been asking why this wasn’t released earlier. And whether this is a candidate for inclusion in future releases. Rather than give you the standard immediately-unsatisfactory answer, allow me to shed some light on how this utility came to be, which may then provide an insight or two into project picking decisions.

The dialog-scrollbar idea first originated sometime last year (prior to my joining the UMPC team) as part of internal experiments conducted by the talented UMPC project pioneers around addressing UMPC pain points. An early prototype was developed but did not quite catch-on. Between project pressures, priorities, and personnel changes, it was pushed to a backburner and ... well, faded a.w..a...y.... Later, as team composition evolved further, the new boss, intrigued by the original idea, prodded me to conduct a revaluation. Unfortunately it was clear to me that the prototype needed TLC. But given the constant-balancing-act-constraints we usually work against, the opportunity-cost of refining it seemed high, relative to potential payoff. Unwilling to distract the project team from their more-critical responsibilities, I decided to adopt the scrollbar as a side project. Somewhat like an abandoned puppy. Little by little, over nights & weekends, I refined the original concept in my 'copious' spare time, until, after significant overhaul, the utility finally started feeling useful. At this point emerged a dilemma. Turning the utility into an ‘official project’ (i.e. engineering it well and releasing it responsibly) takes significant time and effort. Whereas if UMPC native resolutions are expected to eventually go up, how much effort should be spent on a short-term, stop-gap solution? Plus, if the need for the solution is now, the longer it takes to release, the less useful the utility will be. Unable to find a low-cost release mechanism (especially one that did not automatically incur the glorious prize of increased-user-expectations™) I finally decided to treat the utility for exactly what it was: an informal, untested, side-project that users may or may not find useful. And, in the interest of getting it out there quickly, I threw it 'over the wall, as-is. [Thanks for catchingJ].

The astute reader, in reading deeply between the lines, may have already discerned that:

- We usually have lots of ideas internally than we are ever able to ship, especially around addressing pain points.

- Unlike a soulless machine churning out code, most of our ideas (and how they are implemented) come from living, breathing people™. The right people make all the difference, and, unfortunately, these people are usually in short supply.

- Relative to all the software we want to create (and ship), it never feels like we have enough talent or enough time. As a result, we’re constantly forced to triage our investments.

- Like all investors, we hope to maximize our ROI. Which can be done by lowering your costs and/or by maximizing your returns (i.e. having a large impact). (Between 'large impact' and 'narrow impact', guess who usually wins...)

- Responsible, world-ready, engineering incurs a minimum fixed cost for even the smallest of projects. (In other words, there is really no such thing as a small ‘small project').

- The cost a project incurs is directly proportional to the size of the prospective user base. And the size of the user base automatically multiples the cost of getting things wrong (usability, reliability, security, <pick-your-own-metric>,..). Therefore, traditionally the bigger the project/audience, the more conservative the resulting stance in picking investments…

- To further raise the bar a bit, not only must each prospective project address customer needs and expectations, but it must also (among other criteria) further business goals, meet partner requirements, be technically affordable/feasible, and have strategic value for the company.

When you put all the above together, basically you get a system where a lot of ideas may enter, but only a handful emerge in the form of carefully-chosen projects. Hopefully this helps you understand why you will often receive the standard non-committal answer: “Thank you for your feedback. We will take this into consideration as we plan for the future”. Most likely that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Except the bar for turning idea into project usually remains unflinchingly high...

A closing thought: At the end of the day, the UMPC is just a Windows PC. And the UMPC Scrollbar is just an ordinary Windows application. Anyone with an interest in Windows programming can and should write more UMPC utilities and I encourage y'all to try your hand at solving your own pain points. [At the very least, each new utility inspired by the UMPC Scrollbar will help me feel even better about having let the Scrollbar scroll away bits of my otherwise dull life...J]

(PS: Feel free to leave a comment with a link if you know of any UMPC utilities you find useful...).

***

Dead-(see?)-scrollbar, XP-scrollbar...

VikramMadan — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 10:33:00 GMT

While many people seem pleased with the UMPC scrollbar utility I released earlier this week, reports continue to trickle in that an unlucky few are not seeing the scrollbar when they run the utility. Ouch! - this is just the kind of inexplicable bug I was concerned might surface, given this utility is neither production quality nor well tested. [Now you also kinda know why an OS like Vista takes a long time to ship - we spend a heck of a lot of time/effort/resources pounding the (pardon my french) cr*p out of it under every possible permutation, combination, situation, and condition, so as to flush out as many issues as possible before it gets into the hands of users like yourself!]. Yeah, I knew Vista well. Vista was a friend of mine. And this scrollbar utility sure ain't no Vista... (In fact what it is, is nothing more than an abandoned internal experiment from ages past that I happened to stumble upon a few months ago and then attempted to overhaul in short snatches of (ha!ha!) ‘spare’ weekend-time... )

Regarding the disappearing scrollbar itself, that's pretty hard to correctly debug without an on-hand repro. In re-inspecting the code, the only culprit that jumped out at me was an uninitialized variable that might be messing up the scrollbar's dimensions. (For the curious: 'uninitialized variables' are often actually initialized with unexpected, random values and usually lead to hard to repro bugs that vary from machine to machine). I have updated the UMPCScrollbar EXE with a fix and reposted it in its original location. If you previously ran into the scrollbar issue on Vista, please download and try again.

Also, for those who asked for an XP verison of the utility, you'll be pleased to learn this too is now available. Click here to download. Hope this works for you.

Hopefully the updated utilities will work well. If not, I may just end up posting the Scrollbar utility source code so folks can ~~fend for~~ investigate further themselves. (Despite our deepest hopes, I unfortunately have very limited capacity to service this utility further…L).

Meanwhile, on the lighter side:

Eyeing the Display: Illusion and Resolution...

VikramMadan — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:19:00 GMT

Half the human brain (the half not fixated on media celebrities) is directly or indirectly associated with vision. Evolution has apparently decided that what we see, matters. Just as our eyes are our primary windows to our world, the displays on our mobile-computing devices are the primary windows to our information. The bigger we open our eyes, the larger our displays, the more the information we can absorb. Eyes work best when we don’t strain them, displays (LCDs only – I’m ignoring CRTs here) when we run them at their native resolution. We can perceive a few extra details by squinting (i.e. running the LCD display at a higher, non-native resolution) but it doesn’t feel natural. Things get blurry, headaches ensue. No surprise then that it’s in our best interest to find the optimal tuning between eye and display. Eyes you can’t tweak. But displays you can. Thank goodness.

Which brings us to our first topic for today: clarity of text aka ClearType. ClearType technology has been around for a while. Having watched it develop from a very close range – while I worked on the Microsoft Reader product – I willingly profess a certain fondness for it and personally think it’s both under-rated and under-utilized. For best viewing results, UMPC users need to pay special attention to ClearType.

First, a primer. On LCD displays only, ClearType smoothens font edges to make text appear crisp and sharp. Unlike CRTs, where a single un-manipulatable dot represents each displayed pixel, pixels on LCD displays have separately addressable red-green-blue (RGB) component-color sub-pixels (3 per screen pixel). When a character is rendered on the CRT screen, the underlying pixels are either part of the character, or they are not, leading to non-linear edges that make the rendered text look jagged and rough, a miniature version of prehistoric computer graphics on prehistoric displays. On an LCD screen, the jaggies still exist – except ClearType makes them 'more subtle’ by manipulating the 3 RGB sub-pixels under each ‘jaggy’ pixel. Since different RGB combinations produce different colors/brightness, in effect ClearType is manipulating the colors/brightness of the pixels that comprise the font edge. Because human vision is both imperfect and non-linear, from a distance the eye-brain perceives these color/brightness variations as smooth lines and not as colored patterns. In other words, ClearType makes text look good by creating an Optical Illusion. (The illusion itself is effective because the color variations Cleartype creates are themselves based on a model of human vision). And to think you thought Windows was WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)! J Well, it’s not. You’ve been tricked. Talk to your brain! J

There are two key points above that impact your UMPC (or Tablet or LCD...) ClearType experience. Since you probably weren’t paying attention, I’ll call them out explicitlyJ:

(1) ClearType manipulates the Red-Green-Blue sub-pixels directly. The order in which these sub-pixels occur is called striping. The default striping for most LCD displays is RGB (in other words, Red followed by Green followed by Blue). In both Vista and XP, ClearType assumes by default that it is dealing with RGB striping and happily tweaks the pixel components using this assumption. Unfortunately for some of us, the default striping on some (many? all?) 7" UMPC displays is BGR (Blue, Green, Red – inverse of RGB). When you run Vista (or turn on XP-ClearType) on these BGR machines, instead of crisp, clear text, you get fuzzy, multi-colored, rainbow-fringed text! To a sensitive eye like mine, this basically sucks. The good news is that ClearType can handle BGR striping just as well as RGB striping – but you have to tell it to do soJ. The bad news is that there is no inbuilt UI in either XP or Vista to tweak this settingL. But the really good news is that you can run the ClearType Tuner from the Microsoft Typography web site to fix thisJ. Run, don’t walk. (This tuner has recently been updated for Vista. Hooray!)

(2) ClearType tweaks colors based on a human-vision model. As our choice in fashion (or mates!) shows, everyone’s vision works differently. The ClearType human-vision model is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Your perception of ClearType will vary from the person next to you, however much you like that person. Nicely enough, the ClearType Tuner also lets you pick a setting that looks best to your eyes. Another reason to give the ClearType tuner a spin. Sprint, don’t run!

Once you have ClearType adjusted correctly for your display striping and for your eyes, you’ll be surprised at how delightful it is to read text on the 7” UMPC displays (or any other LCD display). Note that ClearType only works at the native display resolution. This is because ClearType is expecting to manipulate each pixel individually. When you run at a non-native display resolution, you’re trying to squeeze more displayed pixels onto each physical pixel, which creates one big, fuzzy, on-screen mess. Which brings us to our second topic for today: the 800x480 default native resolution on 7” UMPCs.

The 800x480 resolution has an official name: WVGA. But an official name doesn’t make this resolution any less funky and non-standard, at least from the Windows perspective. Given how long 4:3 display ratios have held sway, you can’t quite retroactively blame legacy-app programmers for not foreseeing a future teeming with 5:3, 16:9 or other nifty vertical-horizontal combinations. (You can and should, however, hound programmers of new apps that continue to make the same ol’ mistaken assumptions). Due to this lack of futurist foresight, the poor UMPC user will occasionally encounter an errant app that chokes on the screen resolution, refuses to install, shows UI that runs off the screen, and/or exhibits other heartburn-inducing behavior. Thankfully, though, these issues are mostly in a minority. (The majority of Windows apps do work well on the UMPC today). And over time, the native display resolution is expected to move up a notch, which will hopefully make today’s resolution-related issues yesterday’s footnote.

For most of us though, the promise of a better future doesn’t quite relieve the pain of the moment. If you’re running 800x480 on your 7” UMPC, you’ve likely already experienced the first-hand joy of having ‘certain’ windows dialogs run off the bottom of your UMPC screen, making it impossible to get to the dialog buttons. One work-around is to briefly switch to a higher, non-native resolution (painful). Another work-around is to anchor your Windows taskbar to the side instead of the bottom, giving you more vertical working space (which fixes the issue for many - but not all – dialogs).

A third option, one premiering here for your pleasure and consumption, is to download the attached ‘wholly-unsupported' 'pseudo-power-toy’ UMPCScrollbar utility and run it on your Vista UMPC. This utility runs in the background (no visible/configuration UI) and pops up an on-screen scrollbar whenever it detects a non-resizable dialog taller than the available vertical working screen estate. The scrollbar then allows you to nudge the dialog up and down, so you can access the dialog buttons that would otherwise be inaccessible. See the 'readme.txt' in the zip file for more information.

[Note: The UMPCScrollbar utility is compiled against the Windows Vista SDK and will not run on XP. It was cobbled together as a means to an end and is neither aesthetically pleasing nor perfectly engineered. Plus I couldnt bribe anyone to test it so it would help if you kept your expectations appropriately low...:)]

What the #@#%$ is a UMPC? Orig-ins & outs…

VikramMadan — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:40:00 GMT

Mobile technology – it’s everywhere! In the time it took you to read this sentence, a new generation of mobile devices and gadgets probably swept the planet, proliferating faster than the latest unfathomable social-networking fad. Mobility messaging surrounds us, seduces us, engulfs us. A sea of devices. An ocean of choices. Truly, we live in the Age of Mobility™.

And all this because humans are fundamentally mobile! Not only do we want to do what we want to do, we want to do this from anywhere! Have our cake. Eat it too. Thank goodness for wireless - if it didn’t already exist, someone would have had to invent it. (Oh wait...J).

When you think about it, embodied within every mobile-computing device is a Yin-Yang balance of two primal, opposing forces: Functionality and Portability. Ignoring the variable called ‘price’, every single mobile-computing choice involves a trade-off between functionality and portability; too much of one or the other, and the ‘mobile value’ quickly evaporates. For lack of a better imagination, I humbly J name this observation Vikram’s First Law of Mobility: Every useful mobile computing device shall demonstrate the right amount of functionality & portability, but no more. J

So who decides what the ‘right amount of functionality & portability’ is? The obvious answer is: you do. (Compromised-OS? Squint-inducing-screen-size? Repetitive-strain-injured-thumbs? Non-intuitive- interaction-models? Pay-through-your-nose-walled-gardens? Lack-of-compatible-apps? But highly portable? Step right up, folks, all yours for the taking…this offer won’t last! Or maybe it will! J)

Seriously speaking, actively or passively, you’re making that functionality-portability decision whether you realize it or not. In the past, if your functionality needs nudged you into the Microsoft ecosystem (very likely, given the overwhelming range of compatible hardware and software)(or perhaps because you’re the rare soul who just happens to love Microsoft technologies J), your mobile choice was to either adopt something Windows-based (large desktop-replacements, traditional (4+ lb) laptops, lighter ultra-portable notebooks... – all fully functional, but ‘relatively less’ portable) or something Windows-CE-based (very portable, but requiring compromises on apps and data-compatibility). Unlike T-Shirt sizes, the available Microsoft OS-based offerings did not form a smooth continuum from extra-large down to extra-small. Somewhere in the middle, down by the ~8” screen size, persisted a glaring gap. [Meaning if you wanted a full-fledged Windows PC that was smaller than ~8”, hey, happy dreaming... J]

But since nature abhors vacuums, and every healthy eco-system evolves life-forms to fill all available niches, it was only a matter of time before the technology and the desire aligned to fill-in those missing spots, sparking the creation of <ta-daa!> the UMPC</ta-daa!> category. J

The cynical reader may pause at this point to exclaim, “Oy! So it’s just a smaller PC. What’s the big deal?” Wait. Don’t leave yet! J Yes, the Ultra-Mobile PC is a smaller PC. But this is a big deal - at least from the perspective of a deal you did not have before. Consider:

· Functionality: The UMPC is a PC. It runs full Windows. Nothing less. All your existing Windows software works, all your existing Windows peripherals work, all your PC-based data remains compatible. You get to tap into the full value of the Microsoft Windows ecosystem. No compromises. (Ok, maybe a few, but that’s early-adopter pain…we’re working on itJ). Your data lives locally (you’re not at the mercy of web-service uptime or connectivity) and you have some pretty decent computing horsepower at your disposal (allowing you to have the twenty-first century user-experience that you so deserve and crave!)

· Portability: A laptop is still best used on a lap. (Try using one on-the go: e.g. walking from point A to point B). Slate tablets improve this somewhat, but at the 8-12” screen size you’re still going to experience some amount of inconvenience (Anyone been through Airport security lately? J). People carry their laptops on vacation, but not so much in their daily life. Whereas a reduction in size automatically extends the ability to carry a machine to more places and use it more easily in more situations, more spontaneously, adding an element of satisfaction to those otherwise-vacant slices of down-time that punctuate our lives. The less conspicuous, the less cumbersome the technology, the greater ones’ sense of comfort in carrying it around. (Plus, you get to look less-geeky (or more-cool, depending on your perspective). And, for the paranoia-inclined, a much les obvious prospective target for random acts of violence… J ).

· Usability: Try browsing the web on your phone. Or watching a movie on your mp3 player. Isn't that funJ? The 7" UMPC screen (sadly, my stubby fingers and failing eyesight force me to ignore anything smaller for now) absolutely shines when it comes to doing most common computing activities: browsing, music and video, onscreen reading & reviewing, reading/writing email, navigation apps, casual games, photo slideshows, doodling in meetings, surfing on company time, etc … Big enough to be usable with the interfaces you know and love (or hate!), and not-yet-small enough to make UI interaction an exercise in futility and frustration. (I suppose there's a reason DVD-players and in-car navigation systems standardized on 7" screens...) Plus the UMPC has the Baby-Boomer-approved™ ergonomic advantage of being easy to hold in one hand, while simulaneously allowing for comfortable adjustment of viewing angle and screen-eye distance. All the natural-interaction work done in Windows to date surfaces nicely here. Throw in an extended battery, combine it with Vista’s improved sleep-resume functionality, and you can get an awful lot of mileage from this baby. Add a few bluetooth peripherals for that wire-free pizazz. Use it at work. Use it at home. And everywhere else in between.

· Develop-ability: If you are familiar with Windows development, you know how to develop for UMPCs. There's a handful of guidelines to keep in mind, but that’s it. No new tools, no new languages, no need to rewrite apps. All those long nights spent learning Windows (or WPF) programming will still pay off. You get to focus your efforts on unleashing the potential of the new form-factor, not in relearning how to do "hello world" on wannabe platforms J.

· Affordability: Ok, I admit it - this ones a weak point. Relative to where we all want them to be, UMPCs probably feel a tad pricey right now. But there are economies of scale in motion even as we all sit around wasting our time reading and writing blogs.JThe price will come down. We live in hope J...

When you put all that together, what you're ending up with is a new class of pretty-darned-portable, versatile, and useful machines that can enrich many more aspects of your life (than even you suspected were enrich-able), while providing a highly-compatible and familiar experience, backed up by the most extensive technology ecosystem on the planet. So what’s not to like! J

We all have countless mobile-computing choices today. Should your interest in mobility intersect with the Windows world, you kinda owe it to yourself to take a look at the UMPC category, be it for your primary, secondary, tertiary, work, home, kid, companion, travel, or <something-we-never-thought-of> pc.

It’s a new category. It’s not perfect. But there's promise. And potential. Plus we hope to help it grow up and be all that it can be (or at the very least, 'realize it's true potential' J )…

Till next time. Enjoy.

Introducing my Blog: UMPCs, Tablets, and Other Fun With Windows

VikramMadan — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:46:00 GMT

Greetings! My name is Vikram Madan and I am currently a Development Manager on the Microsoft team chartered with incubating the relatively-new Windows Ultra Mobile-PC category (aka UMPCs or Microsoft Origami UMPCs).

In the last few years, I have had the good fortune of being involved with several Microsoft projects that have helped prod Windows out of the confines of the traditional desktop into a richer, smarter computing-platform, better able to conform to basic human needs such as – gasp! – mobility and natural interaction (Humans are mobile? And write with a pen? Who knew!J). From my front row seat, it has been inspiring to watch hardware and software evolve in tandem to open up new scenarios in all walks of life, helping make computing more ubiquitous, more relevant, and more accessible to more people worldwide.

Those familiar with the history of personal computing well understand the pivotal role Microsoft Windows has played in unleashing the technological revolution sweeping the world today. Assuming, like me, that you have your own personal inner-geekJ, what could be more exciting than taking the cumulative value of the Microsoft Windows ecosystem and putting it into a fully functional form-factor that fits in your hands, lets you take all your ‘digital stuff’ with you everywhere you go, keeps you linked to your world from anywhere, and enables you to make the best use of your precious time - irrespective of whether you are working, relaxing, traveling, sharing kids’ pictures with GrandMa, pitching ad-funded web startup ideas to VCs, getting sued for copyright-infringing-user-uploaded content, or just plain ol' trying-to-attract-the-attention-of-attractive-strangers-in-cafés.

Enter <ta-daa!>The UMPC</ta-daa!>. A category of Windows PCs whose potential I am personally very, very, very, very excited aboutJ. In this blog, I will try to share my excitement about, my world-view of, and my personal experiences with UMPCs, Tablets (UMPCs are Tablets, if you hadn’t noticed), and Windows Mobility (Note: Windows Mobility != WindowsMobile), with occasional digressions and ruminations about Microsoft, Software Development, computing technologies and trends, behind-the-scene looks, etc. But, for now, mostly UMPCs. If this might interest you, I invite you to tune in.

More to come. Much more. I promise. You won’t be disappointed. J

PS A special thanks to the Tablet & UMPC MVPs: but for their clamoring for more UMPC voices in the blogosphere, this blog would have remained a procrastinated figment of my imagination. Congratulations, folks! You helped birth this baby. (In other words, it’s all your fault!J)

PPS You will see many hand-crafted drawings on my blog. All of these will have been hand-drawn on a Tablet PC. Before arriving at Microsoft I was an aspiring and award-winning Editorial Cartoonist (and failed Bioengineering researcher – but that’s another story!). Unfortunately for my cartooning career, it was far easier to get hired at Microsoft than to find a cartooning position on a newspaper. Not that I’m complaining – there’s much joy in creating software that impacts millions and millions of users worldwide. Usually in a good way. Groovy, baby. Yeah! J

PPPS For more information about me, please see my profile.

PPPS Standard disclaimers apply (especially the one that says "all opinions are mine and not those of my employer ya di ya di ya da ... ").