The mobile Internet device: In search of itself

I suppose if I were just in search of controversy, I'd write a post to proclaim the death of the MID (mobile Internet device) category. My obituary for the Netbook earlier this week generated a ton of traffic; I suppose I could do that again. Certainly, the concept of a MID--a device midway in size and capability between smartphones and the smallest notebooks--is under tremendous pressure from both sides.

Customers have learned that with a well-engineered browser, the small displays on phones such as Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's G1 "Google phone" are sufficient for most Internet applications (Web browsing, e-mail, chat, etc.). And as I described yesterday, small notebooks are quickly lifting themselves out of the "Netbook" ghetto, gaining performance and cutting power consumption to become reasonable alternatives for those times when a smartphone just isn't enough.

The tokidoki edition Fujitsu LifeBook U820 mini notebook.

(Credit: Fujitsu Computer Systems)

But I think there's still a legitimate niche for MIDs and other miniature mobile PCs. As I've mentioned here before, I used to carry around a 1.5-pound computing gizmo along with a conventional laptop. It was an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100--officially a PDA, not a MID--but it was as close to a MID as the technology of the time allowed. It came with a Web browser, and for a while I had mine equipped with a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem, so I could access the Web and e-mail on the go.

It often seems to me that I would like to go back to that kind of device, rather than trying to make my iPhone and my laptop do the same jobs. In fact, I think my note-taking capability has actually declined with each new handheld platform I've adopted--the Newton was better than the Palm Treo, and the Treo was better than the iPhone. Today, when I attend conferences or want to scribble down some idea that can't be represented in a paragraph or two, I grab a Moleskine notebook (the pocket Sketchbook version).

My own experience is merely anecdotal evidence, however, and I know better than to rely on that. So what are the real markets for the MID?

Coincidentally, I think it works out to three E's: education, entertainment, and executive applications. All three areas lead to situations where a person might want access to more computing and communications resources than a smartphone can provide but won't necessarily want to carry around a notebook--or try to use one while standing--to get that.

The educational market for these small machines has yet to develop because current MIDs don't yet offer the right combination of small size, all-day battery life, and low price, but I believe they'll get there within the next year or so. People often talk about e-book readers as being the right answer for educational computing, but e-books are more about static content, and education is ideally an interactive process.

The entertainment focus was clearest with UMPCs (another dead category, though I'm hardly the first to point that out). UMPCs were marketed as "lifestyle" gizmos, as if many people were ever going to make a relatively bulky 7-inch display tablet PC with two-hour battery life part of their lifestyle. But in a smaller form factor--say a 5-inch display, a total weight under a pound, and battery life of at least five or six hours--a MID can fit this bill. As long as it's small enough (and rugged enough) to carry around in a purse or jacket pocket, and cheap enough to be written off to the entertainment budget like a Netflix subscription or a new TV, a MID could indeed become a lifestyle product.

The Viliv S5 Entertainment MID provides full PC compatibility in a PDA-size package.

(Credit: Yukyung Technologies)

I saw a gizmo at CES that fit this definition pretty well, the Viliv S5 from Korean consumer-electronics maker Yukyung Technologies. Yukyung is one of many companies making portable video players, but its new offerings are quite distinctive.

The S5 is like a right-sized UMPC, with a 4.8-inch touch-screen display (800x480 or 1024x600 pixels, depending on model). It can play HD video, and it comes with Windows XP on a real hard disk, so there's no problem installing other software.

The S5's Intel Atom processor provides very good battery life: the company specifies six hours of movie playback. The device is about 6 x 3.3 x 1 inches in size--a lot smaller than my old Newton--and weighs less than 14 ounces.

There are also two 7-inch screen Viliv machines, the X70 slate-style tablet and the S7 convertible tablet. Both, amazingly, are still smaller than my old Newton.

Executives have always been the focus of some high-end handheld PC developers such as OQO, Sony, and Fujitsu.

Fujitsu didn't have any major updates to announce at CES for its LifeBook U820 series, though it was showing a model with case art from tokidoki, an Italian (but Japanese-inspired) lifestyle brand, and I got a chance to talk with a couple of PR people from Fujitsu about the U820 and other Fujitsu products.

The U820 is basically a complete convertible tablet PC squeezed into a 1.3-pound package: a 5.6-inch touch-screen LCD with 1,280x800-pixel resolution, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB or 120GB hard disk, Windows Vista Home Premium, and so on. It offers pretty much every kind of communication technology a person could ask for: Bluetooth, a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, optional AT&T wireless broadband, and even a GPS receiver.

From my perspective, the U820 is actually smaller than it needs to be, which is most apparent in the micro-sized keyboard, but it's an impressive technical accomplishment nonetheless.

For many people, the new Sony Vaio P-series (a CNET Best of CES award winner this year) may prove to be more practical, with its 87 percent-pitch keyboard and 8-inch widescreen LCD. But the Sony is beyond all but the largest pockets. Sony has made smaller machines in the past, such as the Vaio UX series, but these have been discontinued.

The OQO model 2+ brings better performance at a lower price than earlier OQO models.

(Credit: OQO, Inc.)

OQO also made a big splash at the show with its new model 2+, an unprepossessing name for a product even more technically impressive than Fujitsu's. The new OQO machine has almost all the features of the U820, but in a considerably smaller, lighter package. There are some differences; the model 2+ has a lower screen resolution (800x480) but is available with a faster CPU and more RAM. Also, the OQO is available with an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display that really looks fantastic, with high contrast and deep saturated colors.

The model 2+ is in the same enclosure as the older OQO model 2, hence the trivial name tweak, but there's another big difference from that older product: the 2+ has a starting price of just $999, $500 less than the starting price of the 2. And the base model of the 2+ is a much better system than the high-end model 2 configuration was.

Just as there were some ARM-based Netbooks at CES, there were also some ARM-based MIDs on display. With no clear advantages over smartphones except for display size, I don't think these products will attract customers. But that problem is CPU-specific; it doesn't apply to the more powerful x86-based products.

So okay, there's some good MID hardware out there. Unfortunately, that isn't enough. What MIDs need are lower prices, more rugged designs, and some MID-optimized software. The fact that Windows runs on these small displays doesn't mean that style of user interface is right for them. I know people at Microsoft who are working on this aspect of the problem; I hope they get the chance to bring their solutions to market, ideally in the Windows 7 time frame.

All in all, there's a lot of interesting activity in these smaller form factors. I think these tiny machines face a long uphill struggle to gain market share, but at least they have a unique and clearly defined product concept: a PC in a pocket.

[Dougist2]

Isn't the real answer a mobil keyboard for the iPhone? To create a note "much longer than a few paragraphs" you really need a better input device. A rugged, on the go note taking device - that's what is missing in the market - for those times when thumbs are just not enough.
Doug
www.dougist.com

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Well, sorta. The iPhone's display is its real limitation, much more than the lack of a keyboard. It's true that a clip-on keyboard would make the iPhone a lot more useful for extended note-taking, but it wouldn't solve the lack of Flash, the lack of Java, the very limited multitasking support, and other limitations that are inherent in a smartphone.

And that's okay with me. I don't want my phone overloaded with a bigger screen or background tasks running down the battery. Turning the iPhone into a full MID would make it less effective as a phone.

[jkkmobile]

" UMPCs (another dead category ) " !!??

All devices on this asticle are UMPCs! S5 maybe close to MIDs but all others are real UMPCs for productive and professonal use..

...uuuh

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Oh, hardly. Look at Microsoft's UMPC page. Look at any other definition of the UMPC. Look at all the machines that were introduced as UMPCs, like the category-defining Samsung Q1. The UMPC boils down to a 6" or 7" touchscreen, no keyboard, low performance, low price.

Every machine here except the Viliv S5 is too small, too fast, and too expensive to be called a UMPC. The S5 is very UMPC-like in everything except size, which is why I said it's like a right-sized UMPC. The S5 is the kind of machine the UMPC needs to be in order to be successful. But the S5's size places it squarely in the MID category. It isn't really a UMPC.

[jkkmobile]

Peter, you are mixing totally different cotegories here..

" Look at Microsoft's UMPC page. Look at any other definition of the UMPC. Look at all the machines that were introduced as UMPCs, like the category-defining Samsung Q1. The UMPC boils down to a 6" or 7" touchscreen, no keyboard, low performance, low price. "

You are talking about "Microsoft Origami" which developed into UMPCs. It was just a dream. There were no low priced devices, they all were more than 1000 dollars. Origami is not UMPC.

Nowadays UMPC are productive, mobile computers and typically cost more than MIDs or netbooksThay are running XP or Vista. Examples: OQO, Viliv S7, samsung q1u, wibrain, HTC Shift, Asus R50A, Raon Everun/note, Fujitsu U820

MIDs are smaller, low cost internet enabled PCs for media consumption, typically runing Linux. Examples: Aigo MID, BenQ S6, Nokia N810, USI MID-160, Lenovo Ideapad U8, Digifriends MID, ClarionMiND

" Look at any other definition of the UMPC "

I'm running the site http://www.jkkmobile.com , where we follow and test only these devices and I belive we know what we are talking...

Another good reference to guide you to these products is UMPCPortal.com. Read the Buyers Guide to understand more: http://www.umpcportal.com/2008/11/ultra-mobile-computing-buyers-guide-2008-part-1

MIDs are lowend devices and UMPCs are highend.... and UMPCs are hardly dead, we just got pile of new ones at CES and more is coming at Cebit.. here is " a pile " http://products.jkkmobile.com/

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

I think you're trying to rewrite history to give yourself more to write about.

[ctfoley]

the biggest thing mids need to do is lose the buttons and bezels. a big touchscreen would replace them easily. i think they would be great as ebook readers, movie watchers, or a newsreader to bring into the coffee shop

[dexterra]

It?s interesting to note how different device manufacturers approach the challenge of putting more computing utility in the palm of our hands. But Peter, I?m surprised that ?enterprise applications? was not considered as your fourth ?E.? As organizations continue to look for ways to make their workforce more nimble and mobile, devices like the ones you reviewed will start finding their way into businesses, especially in the field service realm. After all, more than just executive applications can run on these devices. For a couple years now people around the world have been using BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian smartphones to run field services and sales applications. MID devices I think are a step towards a working environment where PCs of any kind will be seen less and less. And while these devices are cutting edge now, Dexterra believes that the trend will be more towards smartphones with more processing power, increased storage and access to faster networks eventually displacing this niche altogether allowing employees to complete important work tasks from wherever they are. If you are creating important content, are you really going to do it on a device that?s only slightly bigger than a phone? On the other hand, if you?re using it for specific applications, why carry a MID and a phone when today?s smartphones (even the less exciting ones) are capable of performing those tasks already.

Michael Liebow, Dexterra