Microsoft release Origami Experience 2

by Brad Linder Jun 14th 2008

Microsoft has released the Origami Experience 2.0. In case you missed out on the first version of the Origami Experience, it's basically a suite of software designed to make it easier to navigate on Ultra-Mobile PCs, or tiny tablets like the Samsung Q1.

The new version requires a touch panel display, 100MB of disk space, and 1GB of system memory to work properly. The new version includes a built-in RSS reader, a new picture password utillity, and a new home screen application called Origami Now.

Users can create custom tiles in Origami Now to make it easier to access information like weather, email, and RSS feeds from one central location. There's also a new web browser called Origami Central that's basically a customized version of Internet Explorer 7 designed for touchscreen devices. It supports ActiveX, Flash, and Silverlight. Origami Central's toolbar auto-hides to maximize screen real estate on small UMPCs with 1024 x 600 resolutions.

[via Ian Dixon]

Tags: origami, origami-central, origami-experience, origami-experience-2.0, origami-now

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Quikboy said 3:45AM on 6-15-2008

Origami Central is actually pretty neat, considering it's based on IE7.

It's pretty darn compact and streamlined, without the extra waste. The auto-hide thing is awesome, reading RSS feeds is great (inc. podcasts), and you can even take snapshots of web pages (handy tool).

It also has that AwesomeBar feature built-in before FF3. You can type in some words, and it pulls some actual screenshots of the sites you visited from your history. It's pretty neat, and IE7 already has a similar capability to search through history when typing in the address bar.

I also like how the search box pulls up popular/past searches as you type. Dynamic indexing is awesome when you don't have a real tactile keyboard.

The only thing it really lacks is tabs and better page zoom (just in/out once). Origami Central would be a great internet browsing solution, if you just need to browse.

If only an Origami Central like browser went onto WinMo phones...

James said 9:53AM on 6-16-2008

If you want something like that for WinMo, hunt around for the Opera 9.5 beta (it's not hard to find...) -- you don't get an Awesome Bar, but on a 400 MHz processor and ~64 MB of RAM, I wouldn't want one. You do get pretty full-featured zooming and stuff, though. I like it!

Quikboy said 3:42PM on 6-16-2008

Thanks James. I'm well aware of Opera 9.5 and it's neat features, but I'd like to see MS make a better mobile phone browser any day now...

symaw said 8:50AM on 6-15-2008

I would like to mention that you don't really need a touch display for OE 2.0. If you like to play with it, just use your mouse on your Vista normal computer. It can be quite fun.

You will love how fast it is compared to Media Centre, thought there are a few small bugs.
For example if you have a lot of movies, pictures or audio files in the playlists, the data information and thumbs from multimedia files (which are shared with Media Player) are read each from individual files and takes too much time to retrieve all (it’s the same as in Media Centre). They should load faster if they would be generated once in a playlist file containing all data information and thumbs of the multimedia files.

Another good feature that I find convenient is IE integrated browser that loads each page very fast (considering its simplicity its normal).

The weather tile is also very nice and efective.

Good tip: Add all your tiles to “Tile Favorite bar” because they will open in a bigger resolution (the tile left bar will disappear making room for the center tile).

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