Crave

Dell is developing a pocket-size Internet device using Google's Android operating system that could take on Apple's iPod Touch, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal on Monday.

Two people who have seen early prototypes of the device told the newspaper it looks like Apple's iPod Touch but slightly larger. And like the iPod Touch, the device isn't expected to include a cellular phone. The device is considered part of a new category of gadgets called mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, which are designed to fit into the market between a mobile phone and a laptop or Netbook computer.

The device could go on sale as early as the second half of 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal's sources.

Dell supposedly started working on the new device about a year ago as a way to compete against Apple's iPod business. The Journal also cited an unnamed source who said that Dell has considered selling the new Internet device through a cell phone carrier. Dell and other computer makers such as Hewlett-Packard already sell their Netbooks through cell phone operators.

Dell has long been rumored to be making a smartphone. And the company has also been rumored to be testing the Android software for its smartphone and possible for its Netbooks. With these developments in the works, it probably wouldn't take much to also develop a portable Internet device using the same operating system without the phone. That's what Apple did with the iPod Touch.

(Credit: Pocketables)

Granted, a mobile phone that transforms into a clamshell minicomputer is not novel. The premium business handset, the Nokia Communicator, immediately comes to mind. However, the LonMID M100 device by NFS is possibly the first to sport an Intel Atom chipset under the hood.

The convertible tablet design, with dimensions of 6 inches by 3.5 inches by 1 inch, brings to mind PDA models like the Sony Clie PEG-UX50 and Dopod 900. But what's unique about the M100 is that a traditional mobile phone with numeric keyboard and a 2.4-inch panel is available on the top lid for quick SMS and phone calls.

The internal 4.8-inch screen has an 800x480-pixel resolution and is powered by an 800MHz Intel Atom Z500 processor with 512MB RAM and 4GB SSD storage. Other features include Bluetooth, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, a MicroSD card slot, and USB connectivity. The unit runs on the Midinux operating system (based on Red Flag Linux), which means you won't have to contend with long Windows bootup sequences.

The LonMID M100 is currently in the prototype stage and its actual launch date and price are not available at this time.

(Credit: Pocketables)

(Source: Crave Asia via Pocketables)

As he has been doing in public speeches and interviews in the last year, Michael Dell has again stirred up speculation about what his company has planned in the handheld market.

In a speech he gave in Tokyo Tuesday, the chief executive of Dell was slightly more specific than he has been in the past on this topic.

"For the last three years, we have integrated 3G radios into our notebooks," said Dell. "We already have agreements with many mobile carriers around Netbook devices, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that we would have smaller mobile Internet devices or smartphones in the future."

The Dell smartphone rumors have swirled since former Motorola executive Ron Garriques was hired. Michael Dell has periodically made reference to "smaller- and smaller-screen devices" that his company was working on, but until now he hadn't spoken about a Dell-branded mobile Internet device, or MID.

Dell is in the process of expanding its lineup of products while at the same time attempting to tweak consumers' expectations of the company that made its name selling discount PCs direct. A smartphone, essentially a handheld computer, appears to fit in with Dell's plan to diversify its lineup of consumer PCs.

With so much attention paid to Netbooks lately, the MID category has been largely ignored as a portable device that basically exists for accessing the Internet. But not by Acer, which looks to be readying a device for the category.

Drawing of a potential mobile Internet device from Acer.

(Credit: US PTO)

An application filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows a small, rectangular device whose front is taken up entirely by screen except for a thin bezel. Besides what appears to be a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack and dock connector for PCs, there's not much else in the way of distinguishing features revealed in the drawing.

It's designed by one Arif Maskatia on behalf of Acer, and the file date was more than a year ago, although the application just recently started gathering attention on tech blogs.

Mobile Internet devices are basically expensive oversized smartphones. They haven't sold all that well because of their "in-betweenness," but things have changed in the past few years. With the increasing ubiquity of touch interfaces and the ability to accomplish more productivity tasks directly in a Web browser, perhaps MIDs could make a push for broader popularity.

Acer proved to be a beast when it comes to selling lots of Netbooks (outselling even global PC leader Hewlett-Packard in Europe) on the strength of aggressive pricing and the option of bundling wireless broadband service. Could it do the same with an MID? Perhaps, but first it would have to actually make the thing. Right now, there's no word on when or if this is going to be available.

(Credit: Crave UK)

While everyone and his dog is releasing tiny laptops, Samsung is still pouring its heart into mid-sized machines. One such device is the R410, which we first had a look at back in May at Samsung's South Korean headquarters.

Back then, we said it was an "absolute steal" thanks to its price tag (499 pounds, or about $977) and generous specifications. Today, little's changed apart from a slight design tweak. It still packs a 14.1-inch screen, a 1.83GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, a DVD rewriter, a 1.3-megapixel Webcam, and Vista Home Premium. See more photos here.

(Source: Crave UK)

AMD took a big step toward improving its mobile offerings earlier this month, but it reportedly has other plans to match Intel's moves into this market.

Electronista spotted a post from a German site called Eee PC News on an AMD processor apparently known as the "BGA CPU," according to what appears to be a presentation slide authored by AMD. As The Register notes, the BGA CPU sounds an awful lot like a processor core called Bobcat that AMD first unveiled in 2007 but has said very little about since.

Bobcat was supposed to be a sub-10 watt processor core for things like thin notebooks and UMPCs, which have since evolved into the mobile Internet device concept. The BGA processor consumes 8 watts of power running at 1GHz, according to the slide, and uses an integrated memory controller. Eight watts is a little too much for handheld devices, but could work well inside a "netbook" such as the Eee PC.

Intel has been putting lots of time and money behind its Atom processor for similar types of systems, and AMD will have to follow suit at some point if it wants to cash in on the growing mobile trend. Its revamped Puma notebook technology is starting to reach customers, but AMD hasn't really addressed the mobile processor market, despite selling graphics chips into cell phones and handheld devices.

While AMD does have experience making processors for low-cost systems such as the ill-fated Personal Internet Communicator and the more successful XO laptop sold by the OLPC project, those systems use its Geode processor, which is getting a bit outdated. The BGA processor would likely bring a significant increase in performance to AMD's products for this category, although it consumes far more power than the 0.8 watts used by the Geode chip inside the XO laptop.

(Credit: Wilkerson Furniture)

Those who are still salivating at the thought of having a state-of-the-art 103-inch HDTV taking up a wall in their apartment probably wouldn't have much use for a retro-designed set from the '50s, but we're sure that others would die to have something like this.

It's hard enough to find furniture that can blend a flat-panel TV into the decor, and it can be infinitely more difficult when there's a specific theme or period that needs to be matched. The revival of "mid-century" design is no exception, and the boom in that genre would most certainly create some demand for something like designer Joe Wilkerson's "M21 Flat Panel."

It's a 42-inch plasma with a cabinet that, from the front, looks as if it could have come right out of the apartment where Lucy and Ricky lived. But the set has a depth that's only a fraction of what it would have been 50 years ago, not to mention a screen that's several times larger.

Unfortunately the retro TV isn't being produced yet, according to Coolest-Gadgets, as its designer is still "testing the waters" before jumping in. If you can't wait that long, there's always the Jetsons model.

It's been a big week for small systems.

On May 29, VIA formally announced (here) its "Nano" family of low-power x86 processors. These chips will be especially valuable in small laptops, UMPCs, and so-called mobile Internet devices (MIDs).

Then on June 2, NVIDIA announced (here) its Tegra 600 family, which is also being marketed for MIDs. But Tegra is a very different animal. It's based on an ARM11 processor core, which can run Windows Mobile or Linux but not Windows XP or Vista.

VIA's Nano processor. The chip itself, the silver rectangle in the center, is about 7.7mm x 8.3mm.

(Credit: Courtesy of VIA Technologies, Inc.)

VIA's Nano processors are based on a new microarchitecture that is a giant step beyond previous VIA products and not far behind that of competing parts from AMD and Intel. Unfortunately, in this business, third place isn't a good place to be. VIA's older processors sold in relatively small quantities for low prices. Fortunately, they were very small and thus economical to make and sell.

The new Nano family offers much higher performance, with clock speeds from 1.0 to 1.8 GHz... but it's difficult to know what these clock speeds mean by comparison with AMD's or Intel's, and VIA isn't telling us, at least not directly. In this white paper on the Nano family, VIA only compares the performance of the new chips to its older C7 series.

But VIA does publish some numbers, so I was able to make some comparisons.

Take, for example, the Nano L2100 at 1.8 GHz vs. AMD's 2005-vintage Turion 64 ML-34 at the same speed, as found in the famous Acer Ferrari 4000 (reviewed here by PC World). The single-core ML-34 was much faster despite the clock-speed parity:

Of course, the ML-34 consumes much more power than VIA's processor; the ML-34 has a 35W TDP (thermal design power) specification, whereas the L2100 has a 25W TDP. The L2100 idles at a mere 500mW, but the ML-34 probably consumes at least ten times as much when idle.

To be fair, I'm not sure these are entirely fair comparisons, since VIA didn't publish the details of their system configuration. Also, VIA's performance position probably looks better on simple productivity applications, but I prefer to look at multimedia performance since that's what we usually find ourselves waiting on. It's been a while since we had to worry about out-typing our word processor...

I'm looking forward to seeing some good performance and power figures for Intel's Atom; I think the VIA chips will turn out to be effectively faster but run a little hotter. When I get more data, I'll post a comparison.

But considering that the Nano is generally 60% to 200% faster than the C7 and much more power-efficient than competing products from AMD and Intel, the new product family will likely improve VIA's market position significantly over the next year.

NVIDIA's Tegra, a high-integration processor for handheld gizmos such as mobile Internet devices.

(Credit: Courtesy NVIDIA Corporation)

NVIDIA's Tegra, on the other hand, offers no compatibility with existing PC systems or software, and its performance isn't even in the same class. The Tegra 600 family's ARM11 processor core runs at a maximum speed of 800MHz and, because it's a much simpler design, it offers a fraction of the effective performance of VIA's Nano.

So how can it possibly compete with Nano in mobile Internet devices?

Well, one answer is that Tegra is meant to deliver a much more complete solution with much lower power consumption. Instead of being just a core on a chip, like the Nano family, the Tegra 600 and 650 consist of a CPU core, a GeForce GPU, special-purpose hardware for accelerating digital video decoding and camera functions, and a dual-display controller that supports HDMI, LCDs, CRTs, and NTSC/PAL video. All of that on a chip the size of a dime, as you can see in the photo.

But the real answer is that what NVIDIA means by "mobile Internet devices" is different than what Intel (which coined the phrase), AMD, and VIA mean by it.

What NVIDIA means is basically any device with a size somewhere between that of a smartphone and a laptop, which can be used to access the Internet. But this doesn't strike me as a very useful definition; it boils down to encompassing anything like a smartphone with a larger screen. It's one thing to claim the Tegra 600 family supports a "full Internet experience" as NVIDIA did in advance briefings last month, but with the wide variety of sophisticated Web 2.0 websites out there, it really takes a PC-compatible system to deliver that experience.

Now, there's no doubt that the Tegra 600 and 650 will enable fun and interesting gizmos for people who buy lots of gizmos. (And honestly, I'm exactly that kind of person.) But I believe most people are not going to be interested in them. Anything larger than a cellphone is too big to carry around all the time. Anything with a screen smaller than about 7" to 9" isn't big enough for comfortable web browsing and movie watching. Anything with a screen that large might as well be a full Windows-compatible system.

Now, over time, these segments will inevitably blur together. Moore's Law will let us squeeze more performance into handheld devices. Software technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight will allow more websites to work on simpler systems. Hardware like high-resolution LCDs and OLEDs and tiny projection displays will help solve size problems too.

But for now, I believe the Tegra 600 family is aimed at a market segment that isn't ready to develop, whereas VIA's Nano has a big market ready and waiting for it. The Nano won't sell as well as competing PC processors from AMD and Intel, but it should help raise awareness of VIA among PC buyers and encourage PC makers to keep pushing more functionality into smaller packages.