Well, I arrived safe and sound back from lovely Hanover, Germany.  It was cold as heck there actually and finding the car in the parking lot at the end of each day proved to be a challenge!  There was obviously a lot of media interest in the announcments at the Intel keynote and MS press briefing.  Many photographers actually rushed the stage to get a picture of the devices.

While I was out, I see many of you have read through my 2 blogs and have replied with lots of questions.  I tried to pick out a number of them that I've heard multiple times to address for you.  So, without further ado.

Does the origami have instant on?

Since these devices are XP based, there is nothing special that increases the boot sequence speed for them, but the resume from standby is quite good and fast.  Most of us have begun setting our untis up to default into standby mode which allows you to save battery life when not in use without having to go through the entire XP boot sequence everytime.  

Having said that, the Samsung unit actually has 2 boot modes on a 3 way power switch - On, Off and AVS Multimedia (that's their name for this mode).  AVS Multimedia can do near instant on by booting into what appears to be XP Embedded (as far as I can tell that is what they are doing) and allows you to play movies, music and photos without requiring you to boot into full XP.  That gives you 2 advantages, presumably better battery life by not having so many services running in the background and fast cold boot startup for media only consumption. 

I wouldn't be surprised to see more OEMs take this tact as it is a pretty easy thing to implement and allows the user a little more control of their experience based on what they are trying to accomplish.

Now Dustin, get some sites up offering units for immediate purchase and we'll give you a nomination for "Most Successful Product Launch of 2006". =)

I like the sound of that! :)  Samsung realistically will be the first units available to purchase in the US, most likely in April. I'm sure you'll see it posted here as soon as we find out they're available. Keep an eye out for availability of other units too such as Founder, ASUS, PaceBlade Japan and others.

Origami doesn't have Voice Recognition for better accessability.

The XP Tablet PC Edition does have speech recognition built in and the Samsung I know has an array microphone that should work pretty well, honestly I haven't tried it on the Samsung devices yet.

Apple is better and their products are sexier and better designed!

MacGirl, it's good to have you on a Microsoft forum :) Seriously though, I realize Apple has become the consumer standard that some people use to measure design and user experience, almost to a cliche'.  Keep in Microsoft doesn't design the hardware as you know but we are trying to take a more active role in working closer with OEMs on their hardware implementation.

What about partnering?  Will that all be handled through the Tablet PC Partner program or will there be a separate vehicle for UMPC developers.
Right now I believe the ISV team has combined the UMPC and Tablet PC efforts.  To get more information though, you can e-mail MPCISV@Microsoft.com.  To be clear though not all tablet enabled apps will make sense on a UMPC and not all UMPC apps will make sense on a traditional tablet.  The small form factor and touch interaction of UMPC means that to have a really great user experience you need to design your UI to really take advantage of those assets. We also really want to see the ecosystem built out with cool consumer targeted user scenarios.

There's one thing missing from the marketing campaign: A PRODUCT.

I do wish that the CeBIT announcement and actual product availability would have been simultaneous but having only a 30 - 60 day lag I think is reasonable.  I think CeBIT was a great forum to show what the products are and how they can be used and I hope all you avid Origami Project fans will run out and buy one as soon as they're available!

No one will look twice at a device that has a life of 3 hours.

Battery life has a long way to go before it meets the holly grail of lasting all day, but I think you'll find you have power available enough places, enough times of the day to find the product really fun and functional even with 3 hours of battery life.  Using it at home you'll have power near by if you need a charge and the car solutions like Samsung showed at CeBIT have a power cord built into it.  I'm not saying all day battery life isn't ideal, but the units are still super useful and most people will use it on and off throughout the day not all day long, nonstop. 

Is there any kind of special sleep mode where you will still be able to, for example, receive email notifications, get IM messages, or listen to music, while keeping the rest of the unit in some sort of power save mode?

Not yet, but technologies such as SideShow in Vista could conceivably be implemented in a way for UMPCs to get the advantage of some of this.  The Samsung AVS Multimedia functionality offers some things such as media consumption as well.

 I still see a big disappointment: where is the good old keyboard??

A lot of interesting work continues to be been done to offer multiple text input methods. While a traditional keyboard is ideal when sitting down typing it's a pretty lously solution when standing up, or using one hand.  This is where our explorations in things such as Dialkeys, handwriting recognition and others come into play.  Companies such as T9 have proven that there is more than one way to skin the text input cat, thumb based qwerty keyboards like those on Smartphones are another example. The real question is what is the best text input alternative for the UMPC form factor when you're most mobile.  I love Dialkeys, so I think it has a lot of possibilities but we'll continue to look into many other alternatives as well.  Also, partners wil be offering a range of keyboard for those on the go such as the Eleksen fabric keyboard prototype that was shown at CeBIT to Bluetooth keyboards that fold up. 

Will existing users who have the little machines like the LS800 and others be able to install the new software as a download?

Currently the Touch Pack is available only to UMPC qualified computers and only as an OEM pre-install.  Since the Touch Pack was designed specifically for small form factor PCs (< 7" displays) with resistive touch digitizers most existing PCs wouldn't benefit greatly from the software.

Is there any restriction on being able to download iTunes to this?  

Nope, this is the beauty of these devices!  With the power of XP underneath you can do everything a desktop or laptop can do but in a way that is more useful in more places.  If you have a large collection of purchased music for instance you could play it all back on your UMPC though the speakers, wired or even wireless headphones.

Is there a developer API to allow integration with the program launcher? What kind of flexibility is there?

Currently Program Launcher doesn't have any API support, but adding some level of integration is something we've been considering.  Right now the flexibilty is really at the user level where they can choose what background they want, what to call their categories down the left hand side and what shortcuts to put into each category.

I've seen it asked "Will Vista run well on the UPMC?"

The Vista requirements aren't out yet, but realistically if the units have the hardware specifications that Vista requires they should be able to run it.  My group will be doing a fair amount of testing to see how Vista runs on the various devices over the upcoming months.