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It’s the paradigm, stupid: hands-on with OQO Model 2+

Ars takes the new OLED, Atom-powered OQO Model 2+ mobile Internet device and …

Last night I got the chance to briefly handle an OQO Model 2+: the hot new MID (mobile Internet device), complete with OLED screen and HDMI-out. Like many UMPC enthusiasts, I was pretty excited about the device and its potential. And when I actually laid eyes on the beautiful OLED, I was blown away. Truly, OLED can't come down in price fast enough. (OQO charges an extra $400 for the OLED version of the Model 2+, bringing the total price up to $1,400.)


But on actually using the device, my excitement was quickly squelched by Microsoft, of all parties. But before I talk about that, here are some more impressions of the hardware:

It was fairly light, and it actually did fit into my coat pocket. I could see carrying something this size around, especially if I had a truly portable, non-laptop need for all that power.

The keyboard was solid but small; the experience for me was about like using the iPhone's onscreen keyboard in terms of accuracy, i.e., it was bad, but would probably get better with practice.

Unfortunately, my brief experiment with text input on the device was a downer, but this was a performance issue (as in, I type a character and then wait for it to appear) and not a design issue. Which brings me to the Microsoft part of my discussion.

It's not that Vista stinks. It's that the UI paradigm doesn't fit the device.

I've been thinking a lot about Microsoft this CES, especially since Ballmer went all out to articulate the company's grand strategy and vision of itself in his opening keynote. So I'll have a lot to say, most of it critical (but hopefully in a constructive way). I note this because I don't want anyone who reads my CES coverage to decide that I'm on a Microsoft-bashing spree and tune me out. So, with that warning in place, back to the problems with OQO.

First, performance was pretty bad. Vista wasn't very responsive on the device, with scrollbars taking some time to render, interface objects failing to immediately gain focus when clicked on, and general laggy redraws. It wasn't unusably bad, but it was bad enough that I wouldn't want to fight it. My own hunch is that Vista is just way too much OS for the Atom hardware, especially on the interface side.

The second problem, and this was a deal-killer for me, is that Vista is a desktop OS. Nothing about it really works on the OQO, even with the device's little hacks (about which more in a moment).

For instance, the Vista desktop on the machine I used was set to some resolution that was quite a bit higher than the physical screen resolution. So most of this large desktop was rendered off-screen, which left you looking at one rectangular part of the desktop at any given time. You had to scrub around with the mouse to see different parts of the desktop. In other words you were zoomed in on one part of the Vista desktop, so to see different parts of it you had to move that viewing port around with the mouse. This just didn't work at all.

Then there were issues with shrinking the keypad down to fit in the device. The physical keys themselves were just too small for my relatively large hands (ed: they're huge), but maybe I could get used to that. The keyboard would also require me to learn a few different other habits for activating function keys and using the small, nub-style pointing device.

Ultimately, the desktop problem and the other issues with the device all stem from the fact that the device itself requires mental compression and decompression to work. What I mean is this: the user has to cache the entire (off-screen) desktop in his or her brain, in order to be able to scrub around on the physical screen in order to find the correct icon or interface element; this cognitive overhead is necessary because you're mentally decompressing the desktop that Vista has compressed in order to fit it into the device. This same mental decompression is required with the keyboard and other interface elements.

Any mobile product that depends on the user's willingness and/or ability to do mental, on-the-fly decompression of a compressed desktop paradigm will fail.

Note that I'm not suggesting that this decompression should take place in hardware somehow; rather, it shouldn't take place at all. The UI and the form factor have to be designed with each other in mind, so that they work together naturally. Palm's pre does does this, the iPhone does this, and Blackberry does this; but Vista or XP + OQO (or any other MID, for that matter) does not.

Ultimately, OQO holds more promise as a Linux platform than a Windows platform, at least until Microsoft gets its mobile act together. As a full-featured mobile Linux device, it's probably without peer.


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