Apple iPhone = Origami done right?

You remember Origami right? This was the consumer friendly name for the UMPC. When the first one of these came out from Samsung, it showed promise but was too big, the battery life was too short, it didn’t have WAN networking, and the touch screen keyboard wasn’t very good. It was also too expensive and the full OS got in the way of the “simple” concept of getting access to a few core applications that would drive the device like multimedia consumption and email. Someone listened and unfortunately for Microsoft (who came up with the idea) it was Apple.

Now Microsoft isn’t the only company looking foolish right now, IBM actually came up with this idea before Microsoft did and every survey I did on the class, which was called Modular Computing at the time, indicated it would be massively successful if it was done right. And had it been done right, it likely could have done for both Microsoft and IBM what the iPod did for Apple. But Microsoft under-funded their effort and IBM didn’t even try in the first place.

Read on at Digitaltrends.