Unfolding Microsoft's Origami

But smart displays never caught on because the price points were too high, he says. "This idea has always been popular one," Shim notes. "The limiting factor has always been if you can't sell it cheaply to the mainstream market, they're not going buy it."

But price isn't the only potential problem for the UMPC devices. Despite their logical appeal, all-in-one portable devices have typically struggled in the marketplace against devices that focus on doing a few things particularly well.

For instance, many portable devices from cell phones to PDAs can play digital music. But those multipurpose devices have done nothing to stop the outsized popularity of Apple's iPod, which is known first and foremost as a great music player.

Similarly, for the UMPC to succeed in the market, vendors are going to have figure out the best applications for the device and explain those to consumers, analysts say.

"There's a real danger of having this thing perceived as a small PC ... [of getting] too excited talking about all the stuff you could potentially do on this thing and not focusing on the things it could do well," says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the tech industry consulting firm Enderle Group.

Gartner's Baker puts the problem a different way. "My initial reaction was that this is a tweener product. I've got a PDA. I've got a notebook. Why do I need something in between the two?"

Another possible impediment to adoption of the UMPC is the lack of vendor support. So far, only five vendors have publicly committed to releasing devices based on the new design, of which the only household name is Samsung.

Notably absent from the list are any of the major PC vendors, such as Dell (DELL Quote), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ Quote), Toshiba and Sony (SNE Quote).