OQO readies its Model 1 uPC

I recently had the opportunity to visit the headquarters of OQO and received a sneak peak not only of their upcoming Model 1 ultra personal computer (uPC), but of their working environment and their marketing plan. The office itself is interesting, an eclective mix of and old and new. The interior of the building looks like the sandblasted shell of a factory built at the turn of the last century, but has been updated with bits of postmodern/industrial looking art here and there. The main striking difference from the offices that most people work in was the lack of walls. Not even cubicle partitions separate the workspaces of OQO's staff. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of doors, they've attached legs and wheels and turned all the doors into desks.

The creative minds that envisioned this unique workspace have come together to push the envelope and build the smallest functional PC that can possibly be built with today's technology. From the looks of the advanced sample that I had a chance to test out, I'd say they've done just that.

The OQO uPC Model 1 is basically a PDA sized notebook PC. The technical wizards at OQO have managed to squeeze nearly all the features and performance of an ultra light tablet/notebook PC into a package that measures 4.9 x 3.4 x 0.9 inches in size. The only major difference between OQO's UPC and a a notebook like a Sharp Actius MM20 is the screen, which is 5in. and 800x480 pixels on the uPC. Other notable differences are the keyboard and the lack of a PC-Card slot. It's got everything else that you'd expect in a full sized PC and a couple of extra features that take advantage of its size. Since the device is designed to be held in your hands while being used, the clever engineers at OQO have included a thumb wheel to scroll through lists and window contents, as well as a magnetic pen that allows you to write on the screen in the way that you'd use a tablet PC. The device is equipped with an array of I/O ports as well as both WiFi (802.11b) and Bluetooth networking. To make things even easier, OQO has created a "docking cable" which has connectors on it every few inches for video, USB, Firewire, Ethernet, audio, and power.

Awesome Technical Achievement, but is it worth the bother?

There's no doubt that the hardware is impressive, but after using the device myself I'm left wondering about the wisdom of running the desktop version of Windows XP on a device that feels like a PDA. Aside from the fact that Microsoft's desktop OS eats up a lot of CPU power, the applications that run on XP aren't optimized for use on a handheld device. As a high-end gadget user I'm more attracted to a super PDA like Samsung's Nexio XP30 or Bsquared's Power Handheld devices. Both of these devices run Windows CE .Net version 4.1, which is an OS designed to be used in handheld devices, so there's a more natural fit for the applications that run on the CE .Net platform. If you're a business user that uses your PC for Outlook and Office applications, then it might be better to choose a device with a PDA OS, especially considering that the newest crop of high end PDAs have 3G networking and phone capabilities built into them.

With that said, OQO says that they're targeting business users to buy their uPC. Businesses that have custom applications that run only on PCs could be served well by this new class of device that's substantially easier to handle and carry around than a notebook PC. After hearing their pitch, I tend to agree... with parts of it. While I think that the device will be a star at running vertical applications, OQO's other business target users are corporate executives who leave their notebooks in their docking stations and don't carry them around. Apparently the fact that an executive has a device that's mobile, but doesn't move it, is extremely troubling to the IT staffs of many fortune 500 companies. To solve this problem they want to swap out the notebooks PCs these executives are using with OQO uPCs in the hopes that the executives will carry them around more if they're smaller.

Personally I don't see the point, and I think that anyone that had a relatively powerful notebook replaced with a much less powerful uPC would ask for their old PC back pretty quickly. Time will tell if executives accept these devices as their only PC, or if they use them as a really high end, high status PDAs. Either way, as long as the IT guys don't send back the ones the execs aren't using, OQO benefits.

The only really important feature that I can see that's missing in this device is the lack of 3G networking. I spent a lot of time discussing this with the company and got two answers on this issue.

1) "We're working diligently on successfully launching the device in September, and we don't want to discuss future plans or anything that isn't already in the current design." A fair statement considering that they first announced the device in 2002 and are a bit late in shipping it as a product.

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