This week Microsoft and Intel finally revealed the Origami, their "Ultra-Mobile PC" platform. Reaction from most of the blogs and news sites has been one of disappointment — there were a lot of teasers and speculation on what the device would end up being, but it turns out it's just a tablet PC that's smaller than a laptop but bigger than a PDA. Microsoft's goals for the platform are to be able to run a full version of Windows XP (instead of Windows CE or another Mobile variant of the operating system), with full-day battery life (instead of a few hours) and integrated touch-screen support. Ken Fisher of Ars Technica and Steven Musil of CNet news.com offered their takes on the announcement.

As for us, we're just confused by the marketing. Early teaser ads (which have since been removed from the internets) showed the predictable groups of young, attractive hipsters exchanging pictures and e-mail and music while out in the desert or lounging by a pool. Intel's vision, however, is straight out of "The Flintstones." A woman asks her husband for permission to buy a dress; he's all pissed off that she interrupted his Water Buffalo meeting and demands she provide links to show how much it costs. Some dude is looking at soft-core porn in a doctor's office when his boss e-mails him to scrawl some notes on a car ad. A helpless woman gets lost in the city (you know those women drivers!) and needs a computer to point out the door that's right in front of her. We expected a little pterodactyl to pop out of the thing and say, "It's a living!"

Other highlights of the week in tech:
There are plenty of device announcements going on at the CeBit trade show in Germany, in particular developers announcing new Origami devices. Here's CNet news.com's round-up, and Gizmodo.com's coverage. We're most interested in the touch-screen thumb keyboard on the new devices.

Ars Technica reports that Google bought web-based word processor Writely, furthering speculation about a web-based office suite from Google.

Apple introduced the "Multi-Pass" for subscribing to certain shows ("The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report") over the iTunes Music Store. The system lets customers pay a fee for a block of episodes instead of $1.99 for individual eps, furthering speculation about subscriber-based media content distribution from Apple.

And in our last post about the Mac mini's capabilities as a media center, we were just talking about built-in, pre-installed capabilities for content. Commenter Jake of 8bitjoystick.com pointed out that there are plenty of third-party apps if you're interested in using the mini as part of your home theater; this page from pure-mac.com has a bunch of (their) recommendations.