Pre-Blogging the Microsoft Origami Announcement

What’s better than live blogging Microsoft’s unveiling of the mysterious Origami project? Pre-blogging the Origami announcement, of course.

Earlier this week I tried live-blogging the live blogging of the Apple product announcements. To be honest, it was all just a bit too meta — even for me. Instead, I’ll take this opportunity to do one last round-up the various rumors surrounding Origami:

• It’s a portable media device that plays music, video games, and performs handwriting recognition. In other words it’s a portable game machine that you can also use as a tablet PC. Or maybe it’s a tablet PC that you can also use as a portable game machine.
• It’s larger than Sony’s PSP and may cost more than $300. Or maybe it’ll cost more than $500. No one really knows. And really, how could they, what with the legendary ultra-secrecy of the Microsoft Marketing Machine.
• The device will come in either black or a truly weird shade of lime green that has a certain glow-in-the-dark plastic look about it.
• Early suspicions that the Origami might be a Roomba killer may have been greatly exaggerated. There’s no reason to believe the Origami will have the ability to crawl through plush shag carpeting sucking up cat hair.

Regardless of what Origami turns out to be, it’s unlikely to make a serious dent in the lead Apple has taken in the digital convergence race. Unless Microsoft announces a new online media store and partnerships with several major film studios, they’ve got a lot of catching up to do. A single device is only the first step if Microsoft hopes to compete. It’s a new millennium and Microsoft is now the underdog. The sad thing is I usually root for the underdog.