This year’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) conference brought forth a flood of new information straight from the gurus at Microsoft. In addition to the information on Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Server “Longhorn”, and a series of technical Windows-based technology briefs, Microsoft unveiled a series of UMPC conceptual designs, showing that they intend these systems to be flexible enough to fit into every facet of our lives. While these machines are simply concepts, two of the machines caught my eye as devices that might potentially find a place in the computing world.
The first is a UMPC designed to be a dedicated media player, by the looks of the design. Portable media solutions have been popular with consumers for years, but to have a media player that doubles as a real PC would be something else. While the UMPCs available now can do multimedia in addition to normal PC functions, a UMPC with the playback controls built into the hardware itself would make life much easier for less tech-savvy consumers who need multimedia on the go without the hassle of having to figure out how to open Windows Media Player by hand.
The second UMPC prototype, and the more interesting one in my opinion, was a UMPC made to resemble an Xbox controller. Done in the same style as the Xbox 360, the UMPC is not Microsoft-made, though Microsoft had hoped that a game-oriented UMPC would become a reality in the near future. At this time, it’s unclear as to whether or not a UMPC like this would be able to also Xbox games (Xbox 360 games are very unlikely, given that the 360 runs on a tri-core PowerPC Processor), but a tie-in like that could almost guarantee this UMPC’s success, not to mention put to rest all these rumors we keep hearing about Microsoft developing their own Xbox handheld. Only time will tell what actually makes it to the consumer line, but if these concepts are to be believed, the UMPC era just got more interesting.
Via WinFuture.de
