Is XP Really Necessary for UMPCs?

Last week I wrote about the possibility that the booming market for ultra-mobile PCs like the Asus Eee and the Everex Cloudbook might give Windows XP a new lease on life. But the more I use these little devices, the more I question whether an expensive, overfeatured operating system is really necessary except as a checklist item for corporate sales.

I've been trying out the Everex Cloudbook, an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) that falls into the same category as the as the Asus Eee and the One Laptop Per Child XO. All three run different flavors of Linux. At least two of them, the Eee and XO, are officially romancing XP: Asus recently announced a Windows XP-based version of the Eee with a bigger screen, and the OLPC people are working with Microsoft to develop a version of XP for the XO.

And Everex is apparently watching the market closely: in the course of an email exchange about the Cloudbook somebody from Everex asked me how I thought the market would react to these moves to put XP on UMPCs. I guess the move will sell some Eees, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea for every UMPC maker to rush to XP.

Why wouldn't I advise Everex to meet the competition and offer an XP-based Cloudbook? Because I think it would dimish the differentiation of the Cloudbook and similar tiny PCs. I'd much rather see Everex and other companies in similar situations devote their efforts to solving a few very particular problems with Linux that would

In a way, UMPCs have turned the tables on Microsoft. On these small, inexpensive computers Windows is going to have meet expectations that have been set by Linux. And to the extent that the Eee and the Cloubook and the flood of similar machines that will surely follow. (We can expect to see a similar class of desktop ultra-miniature PCs like the Zonbu and the LimePC Thin PC this year, too).

These devices are essentially appliances – packages of hardware, OS, and software that can be used with only minimal effort. And as such they're about 90 percent of the way there. I'd urge the manufacturers like Everex to focus their efforts on fixing the other 10 percent rather than using XP as a marketing crutch.

The problems aren't with the hardware, but with the fit between the OS and the hardware. When the Cloudbook first shipped it came with a horrendous bug on the very first screen of the set-up routine: you couldn't see or scroll to the "Continue" button. It turned out that only an ALT-click-and-drag would reveal the button – a Linux convention that's not at all intuitive to Windows users.

The Cloudbook's 800-by-480 WVGA screen too often forces you to scroll horizontally and vertically to see an entire Web page, like looking through a keyhole (this problem also afflicts the Asus Eee, which uses the same screen).

The Eee has its own problems with Linux. The first Eees came with 512MB of RAM, but the Asus hardware will support up to 2GB of memory. So what happens when you open up the device and pop in a 2GB SODIMM? Nothing. Because the Linux operating system won't recognize the memory upgrade. To use 2GB of RAM with an Eee you have to recompile the Linux kernel – on a separate Linux-based computer.

I'm not a Linux guy, obviously. But I would love to see the companies that are installing Linux on UMPCs succeed. I love the way these little devices just work. I love the speed with which a small-footprint Linux distro boots up, for example. I don't see anything wrong or inadequate about the execution speed of the Cloubook or the Asus Eee, given what I use these devices for. And I think the hardware is scaled appropriately to meet the performance needs of the kinds of tasks I expect to use a UMPC for.

Boot-up and shut-down times are a key differentiator, a real plus for UMPCS. Windows is at a disadvantage here. It needs a lot of tuning, a lot of paring down and throwing away, to get to the point where it's as lean as the Linux on UMPCs.

UMPC program execution performance is perfectly satisfactory. I don't expect a UMPC to do compute-intensive work, just as I don't expect a UMPC to store gigabytes of output from compute-intensive programs -- huge spreadsheets, collections of photos, megabytes of documents and PDF files. I use a UMPC for communications -- Web browsing, email, word processing -- rather than number-crunching. The performance of the devices I've looked at, the Asus Eee, the Intel Classmate, the OLPC XO and now the Cloudbook, are all perfectly adequate for that. Again, I'm not sure Windows has any real advantage here. Do I need the overhead of Windows just to run Firefox? No, because once I'm in Firefox I get the same interface regardless of OS.

Overall, I'd advise Everex not to slap Windows on UMPCs just because it eliminates a common purchase objection. I'd advise Everex to take the money they would spend on Windows licenses and invest it in some research and development. The UMPC opportunity is not in creating still more commodity hardware that's standard enough to run Windows, but in creating confections of hardware and software that meet particular needs of computer users in non-standard ways.