“Hello World!” said Origami on Thursday and a new category of PC - Ultra Mobile PC appeared.

Not that there were no hints about Origami UMPC earlier with Microsoft’s Origami project site and Intel’s “slip-up” a day before.

So what is UMPC? UMPC is a refernece design from Microsoft for a new category of devices. Concrete specs for UMPCs will depend on vendors that produce them, however, to be included into this category UMPCs are expected to have following features:

Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 OS
Approximately 7” (17.8 cm) diagonal display (or smaller)
Minimum 800 x 480 resolution
Approximately 2 pounds (0.9 kg)
Integrated touch panel
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled

Intel would want all UMPC’s to run on their chips and is very much behind the development of these computers, but Microsoft says that other processors, like Via’s C7-M ULV chip are accepted in this category.

According to Bill Mitchell , Vice President of Widows mobile Platforms division:

“…UMPCs will all feature small, lightweight designs…and offer the user a choice of text input methods. The touch-enhanced display can be used as an on-screen QWERTY keyboard (called dial keys) to navigate, or users can employ a stylus to input handwritten information. They can also input content with a traditional keyboard, linked either by USB port or wireless Bluetooth connectivity.”

The first UMPC devices are expected to have battery life of two and a half hours or more, come with 30-60 GB hard drives and minimum of 256MB of memory.

UMPCs main selling point is portability and their design is optimized for mobility and ease of input. They are smaller and lighter then most other fully functional portable PCs on the market and are first to have Windows Touch Pack software.

Touchpack is a new kind of user interface that optimizes UMPC for finger based touch input. It makes standard windows controls bigger and more responsive for touch interaction. Desktop is replaced by Program Launcher where shorcuts to your applications are stored and organized. Since most of UMPCs are not expected to have a hardware keyboard, it is replaced by software QWERTY keyboard utility with a twist. Called Dial Keys and developed by outside vendor Fortune Fountain Ltd it splits standard layout into two parts on different sides of the screen so you can use both hands for text entry. Touch Pack also has a new full screen Windows Media Player skin. It provides bigger media access, control and navigation buttons that makes UMPCs as easy to operate as any portable media player. And, finally Touch Pack comes with a new logic game - Sudoku - that is rapidly gaining in popularity around the world.

Microsoft had 3 vendors - Samsung, Asus and Founder - with the devices running on Intel Celeron M chip on board for the launch date. Models using the VIA processor are expected to arrive from TabletKiosk and PaceBlade Japan, also in the second quarter of 2006.