At 0200GMT tomorrow, the first of the keynote speeches will be kicking off in Beijing at Intel’s Developer Forum. Having seen many of the presentations and looked quite closely at the schedule its clear that there’s a lot going on out there. For the UMPC market, there’s four main things to look for.
1 - Details about how Intel sees the UMPC market splitting and when? 2007 or 2008? If it’s 2007 then we need to consider McCaslin. According to the presentations seen in the last 24 hours, it looks like Intel thinks it will happen in 2007.
2 - Is McCaslin a single hardware platform, like Centrino, that will support both Intel’s UMPCs and MIDs? McCaslin could be platform with a common CPU and a few options on GPU. According to the MIDLinux information, there is support for i915 (GMA900) GPU which means that maybe the MIDs would only support GMA900 graphics. This means that the Samsung Q1 Ultra is not a MID! Its running Vista+Aero and its priced at $1200 (according to our Samsung source.) The question remains, if $1200 is a business level device, how much should a consumer-level device be? I think we are talking at $800 and down here.
3 - There are 4 devices to be announced. Will the devices be MIDs or UMPCs. One of the devices shown at CeBIT (and categorised as a consumer device with the same target market as a MID) was running Windows. One could be the new prototype we saw via ZDNet today. I feel quite sure I saw this on a screen at the Amtek stand in CeBIT but I’m not 100% sure.
4 - RedFlag MIDLinux. Will it be for Intel hardware only? Downloadable? Backwards compatible with i915 and i945 based UMPCs (Q1, R2H, UX etc)
The agenda for the IDF can be found here and it looks like there are at least 6 events that could be of interest. Keynotes, Chalk Board sessions, the HP Mobility talk and all the track sessions.
