SPOnG has watched patiently over the last few days as news of a Microsoft-engineered portable device has slowly bubbled to the top of the gaming quagmire, and can now report that what originally looked certain to be little more than a disappointment now looks increasingly more like one of the biggest gaming stories in a long time.

Reports from the tech sector spoke of a machine codenamed Origami, a moniker Microsoft has bandied around for some time, destined for an unannounced device. It looks as though the Redmond software giant is poised to unveil a high-end multimedia and gaming device sporting the name – and is going to show its cards, from what we can tell, on March 3, 2006 – just three days away at the time of writing.

The Origami device would appear to be the finalised portable device Microsoft originally touted last year at a conference in Seattle, when the firm made reference to plans to release a machine it dubbed Ultra Mobile 2007. From that conference, videos cropped up on several sites a year after the event, only to be taken down within minutes of being posted. One, hosted by DigitalKitchen, showed the device running Halo (believed to be the PC version) flawlessly.

Have a look at this website from which the grabs to the right of this piece are taken. It is registered to Microsoft and called Origami Project and clearly refers to a full-scale showing of something on March 3.

Or course, speculation is rife (and well-grounded) that the Origami, essentially a closed-platform tablet PC from what we can tell, will become part of Microsoft's increasingly aggressive push from the offices of the world into the living spaces of its inhabitants. The Origami, stated to cost between $500 and $800 by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, is likely to bridge the gap between the Xbox 360 and the PC, perhaps opening non-Media Center machines to the HD era of looking at pretty stuff from sofas. After all, isn't looking at pretty stuff in high-definition what the future's all about. It must be. We're told it is 17 times a minute...

We'll have the full skinny on the Origami as soon as possible. So don't go reading any other sites, bitches! We'll know if you have. Let us know your thoughts on the Origami in the forum below.