I’ve just come out of the Intel Mobility meeting where Pankaj Kedia outlined the latest status of Menlow (now Atom) and the future Moorestown platform. Much of the presentation contained information we’ve seen before but there were one or two interesting points made.

• For a device to be a Centrino Atom device, it will need to have a screen of 6″ or smaller with a total diagonal dimension of 7.5″ The thickness needs to be 1.2″ or smaller.
• There are no minimum specifications for battery life.
• In most usage scenarios, comapred to Stealey-based devices, the power drain will be half. Thinking off the top of my head, that means browsing at 5W and playing a video at about the same drain. Considering that the battery sizes will be half of those we see in a lot of devices, the in-use battery life will be about the same. Don’t expect 4 hours battery life on these MIDs. 2-3 will be more like the norm although i’ll be happy to be proved wrong on that one.
• There will be 25-30 devices launched in 2008. In the summer we should expect to see many of the devices we have seen before. Gigabyte, Aigo, LG, Toshiba, Digifriends, EB.
• The Intel ecosystem is growing.

There seems to be a gap in the marketing though and its the pro-moile user. Atom goes up to 1.8Ghz but even this might not be enough for the pro user. Based on what I’ve seen and heard, Menlow at 1.8Ghz matches 1Ghz CPUs of three years ago so for the pro mobile market, it looks like we’ll have to rely on manufacturers designing around the ULV laptop platforms. Samsung and Sony have proved that this can be done. It won’t be cheap, but it will be possible. I’ve posted a gallery of images from the presentation and included images of a few of the MIDS. After the meeting I got a very brief hands-on with the LG MID. It feels very nice and the slider mechanism is assisted, strong and smooth. Keyboard layout seems to mimic the OQO and even the feel of the keys is somewhat like the OQO. That’s not a bad thing at all. There’s an SD slot too which is something I always like to see. The LG wasn’t running so wasnt able to get into any perfromance testing but hopefuly i’ll get some hands-on with that this afternoon when we (JKK and I) meet Intel for a one-to-one.