We analyze the outage performance and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT), originally introduced by Zheng and Tse, for multiple antenna Rician channels or channels with partial channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). The asymptotic behaviors of the outage are analyzed in the limit of high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We also analyze the SNR where the maximum diversity order (MDO) is obtained for Rician channels, which serves as a desired operation point. In addition, by applying the outage analysis for Rician channels we present the differential DMT (DDMT) to develop a better understanding of the asymptotic relationship between the outage probability, transmission rate, SNR, and Rician factor.