Wow… and I thought netbooks were boring…

Seems strange that we’ve been seeing quite a few MIDs lately, but not in the capacity in which they were expected. Intel is responsible for propagating the term MID and the initial plan was to couple these devices with the Atom platform to have pocketable web access ‘companion’ device that could also function as a media player and productivity tool. However this hasn’t quite come to fruition as the current Atom lineup just doesn’t lend itself to the type of device that people want in their pocket. Instead of X86 architecture running a full OS for two or three hours, the masses seem to want always-on all day devices. At this point, we’ve only seen that achieved with some combination of the ARM platform and a ‘mobile’ OS (Android etc.). Seems like we’ll need to wait on Moorestown to see Intel’s true vision of a MID.

Until then, we’ve seen a relatively small number of attempts from large companies to create MID devices. The Archos 5 Android Internet Tablet is a good example of a pretty well done MID, but at this point not many other big companies are following suit.

Filling the void seem to be a bunch of ‘no-name’ MIDs coming out of Asia from companies that I’ll wager most of us never knew existed. We should be happy that there are MIDs being made, right? Unfortunately there are several problems with these devices:

1. Inconsistent specs and info

As is the nature of these devices, it is hard to find solid and consistent translations of specs or convincingly official information about a given device. Maybe it’s our fault for trying to buy devices which are designed for the Asian market, but most of the time it seems that emails need to be sent to the manufacturers to determine exactly what the specs of the device are, what version of software they are running, included wireless radios and supports bands, etc. “Marketing” seems to only come in the form of YouTube videos showing off what seem to be perpetually early builds of these foreign devices.

2. Early-adopters as beta testers

Another frightening trend with no-name MID companies is their willingness to ship units ripe with bugs, or lacking features that were claimed. Several of the devices out there today mention “Android capable”, but ship with Windows CE instead, promising updates at later times. But how is a consumer to know whether or not these companies will follow up on those promises in a timely manner? Even if they do provide these updates, how many users really want to go through the process of a firmware upgrade? Is it too much to ask that these devices be released once they have been thoroughly tested and polished?

3. Availability

This is one of the most peculiar problems. Even if someone wants one of these devices, it is rarely clear whether they are yet on the market, or where to buy them. Best case scenario, you can pick up a device through a big name importer, which usually makes sure that these devices are in working order. But these random MIDs we’ve seen lately aren’t hitting the big name importers, they are often sold direct through the OEMs website and sometimes can only be purchased in bulk! One of the biggest roadblocks to actually owning one of these is deciding whether or not you trust the company to ship the MID to you after forking over your cash, the vast majority of consumers (and even of hardcore gadget gurus) aren’t going to be tracking these guys down and trying to ascertain a unit from overseas.

4. None of these devices are going mainstream

All of the points listed above lead to these devices staying random no-name MIDs. Even when one breaks out of no-name land and makes rounds on the web, like the SmartQ 7, all of the above issues prevent these units from being anything more than a geek toy. Which is really sad considering this is the state of the majority of MIDs that we see today.

For those of you paying attention to the segment, it seems like MIDs never really took off as Intel envisioned them, but they picked up an additional component, phone capability. Now we see devices like the HTC HD2 which could be considered a pretty good attempt at a MID, but we are still calling these devices smartphones. So maybe Asia hasn’t caught on that we’ve made the jump from standalone MIDs to MID + phone devices, or they just really like to cobble together generic Slate devices running Windows CE – either way, these no-name MIDs that we’ve seen lately are doing nothing but giving a bad name to the term MID, and I’m really hoping that they aren’t a sign of things to come. Maybe if Dell would hurry up and show us a decent attempt with their rumored Streak MID, we could break out of this boring no-name MID era.

And just in case you were wondering, this article was inspired by this device as well as other random MIDs we’ve seen over the last few months.

The Boy Genius Report has their hands on a pre-production version of the Motorola Droid, and has a pretty thorough preview of the device which is running Android 2.0. Sounds like 2.0 brings some much desired improvements, and it’s good to hear that Verizon won’t be touching the Droid in terms of software. I still have nightmares of terrible proprietary Verizon interfaces locking down functions that a phone was supposed to supposed to support (cough*bluetooth*cough), though I still squirm a bit seeing that ugly Verizon branding.

I don’t find the phone itself to be too attractive, especially the keyboard, but with a huge, high resolution, capacitive touchscreen, the Droid looks like it’ll be a nice MIDphone, and certainly goes to show that smartphones are really heading in this direction.

What do the readers say? Would you prefer to have your MID separate from your phone, or have a nice MID that is also a phone?

It is just me or does it seem like Android is the hot thing right now? Motorola and Verizon have been teasing the internet for the last few days about their upcoming Droid phone which is powered by Android (of course). Well the joke is on them as the Droid page seemed to have accidentally popped up ahead of schedule and the folks over at the Boy Genius snagged screenshots of the pages before they had a chance to take it down. Check the Droid’s specs:

• Slider with physical keyboard
• Runs Android
• 3.7”, 16:9, 480 x 854 touchscreen
• 5MP camera with 4x zoom, autofocus, and dual LED flash
• 550MHz CPU
• Included 16GB Micro-SD card
• GPS
• Bluetooth and WiFi

There aren’t too many other details at this point, but with a faster CPU than most Android phones to date, and a 16:9 screen, the Droid is shaping up to be a nice MIDPhone. Engadget also has a video from the site showing the Droid in a 360 view, head over to check it out.

We’re finally getting a look at what the Moorestown MIDphones of the future should offer us. Chippy has a short demonstration of Wind River’s interface running on top of Mobilin. This is designed for MIDs as compared to the standard Moblin which has an interface based around more standard input devices (ie: mouse and keyboard on a netbook). The demo you are about to see below is running on the Inventec MediaPhone that jkk went hands on with at Computex 2009.

While some of the demo looks pretty good, such as the smooth application opening animation, it is also quite disheartening to see that they couldn’t even get the app pages to slide smoothly at this point. Hoping that it won’t end up shipping like this (it doubtfully will).

[MIDMoves]

Entertainment, Location, Communication and Productivity along with the highest quality internet experience possible on fast hardware and a focused operating system, in the pocket. That’s what Intel is aiming at with their MIDs and that’s pretty much what Nokia, with the help of Texas Instruments, have just launched with their Maemo-based N900.

It’s clear that the high-end, consumer and web-focused MIDPhone market will have more than one player and there’s still a long way to go before the N900 can be marked as a solid product but based on the specs, the form factor and the operating system it’s fair to say that Nokia have beaten Intel into the ‘MID’ market, stolen some credit and are well positioned to bring out more OMAP/Maemo 5-based products into the MID market.

By building a Linux-based operating system with a Mozilla-based browser on an advanced CPU with advanced graphics capability they’ve nullified some of Intel’s arguments and made it harder for Intel to differentiate themselves. I’m sure that there’s some re-writing of IDF keynotes going on right now to try and address it.

What Intel will have to do with their Moorestown-based devices in 2010 is create and highlight clear advantages for the customers, designers, manufacturers and software vendors.  Processing power is still an important card and Intel still have that in their hand. It’s nigh-on impossible to accelerate the retrieval and rendering of web pages so CPU power would really be noticeable. There are web runtime components such as Flash and Air to consider too but these issues are being resolved in the ARM community. On the applications side one could argue that innovation in the smartphone sector is richer than that which we’re seeing on the desktop so when it comes to the thousands of Linux apps built for X86, it’s kind of a dead argument. As for the developer challenge, I don’t know. Growing a huge but cheap dev community has it’s downsides so Intel / Moblin may find it an advantage that they don’t have an app channel.

As I mentioned above though, this market is not going to belong to one or two players as It’s going to grow rapidly and there will be opportunities for everyone. It’s now clear that the MID market is real and Nokia, along with Apple, could prime the customer base nicely for 2010 and beyond. Every time the man-on-the-street sees a fast, accurate representation of a desktop-style website in a pocketable form factor it is free marketing that anyone could take advantage of. Intel don’t need to change their focus on that MIDPhone and let us not forget that they have their fingers in many pies with the Atom product. Netbooks, Internet TVs and the automotive industry are all growing too.

We’ll hear more about he N900 next week when the first hands-on reports come back next week (I’m trying my best to get down there but it’s not working out right now.) and we’ll hear about Intel’s smartphone strategy in a few weeks at the Intel Developer Forum so it will be very interesting to see how people react once the excitement has faded in October.

Talking about MIDPhones, here’s an update on one that’s been knocking around in bitmap form for quite a while now. It’s the dual-CPU, dual-OS MIU HDPC. (Hybrid Dual Portable Computer.)

Rather than going for the all-in-one OS like Moblin is, MIU have basically stuck a phone on top of a 4.8” Windows XP UMPC although to give them credit, it does look a little more attractive than it sounds.

There are some interesting features too. If the specs are to be believed, MIU have put a 5mp camera in with an optical zoom along with a nifty 180 fold-over screen. There’s a FM transmitter, mouse (we assume the big round button is a mouse pointer) and HDMI out! According to the company website it looks like they have/are touring the U.S. looking for large customers right now. They will need to step it up a but though because Moorestown arrives soon and will enable simpler, smaller, more integrated and probably cheaper designs than the HDPC. There’s another gotcha too. The specs say ‘Cellular 2G’ That’s the deal-breaker for most people there.

MIU HDPC Specifications and community page.

Via Pocketables.

After reading the article, don’t forget to check out the poll at the end.

I took the opportunity to test out a few handsets yesterday. The Nokia N97 (I’m still not impressed) the HTC Magic Hero (a slick experience that I’m seriously considering as my next phone now) and the Toshiba TG01.

It’s the Toshiba TG01 that I want to talk about today as for me it represents the fusion of the relatively high-powered web-focused MID concept and the 24/7 pocketable phone. It’s got a 4.3” 4.1″ 800×480 screen and a high-end smartphone processor. It’s not as big as the 4.8” Intel MIDs and yet it’s much bigger than most phones out there. As it turns out I wasn’t impressed by the TG01. The UI seems pretty thin and unnecessary and to be honest, I didn’t go much further after pressing the web icon and seeing Mobile Internet Explorer pop up. It was a shocking expose of the underpinnings of the TG01. But that’s not the thing I wanted to write about.

It’s the size that really struck me. For a phone, it’s HUGE! There’s simply no way that the average person is going to be able to use this as a 24/7 phone. I don’t mean to imply that the TG01 is meant to be a 24/7 phone but it proves that convergence between the full internet minimum screen resolution of 800×480 and the 24/7 total convergent device is simply not going to happen for most people. Yes, there are people out there that can regularly handle 250+ pixels per inch with standard browser font sizes but for me, and I imagine most people, 800×480 in anything less than 4.8” is going to be sub-optimal for full web browsing. On a smaller, pocketable-sized 3.5” screen either you bump the font sizes up on and reduce the screen real estate or you suffer with a time-consuming zoom operation. Looks like Apple really did the best they could with the size of their iPhone.

This isn’t actually a new thought for me. I’ve always said that 200ppi is about the best for handheld web browsing but over the last months I’ve been open to the idea of pushing that screen size down and the PPI figure up in order to get the ultimate converged mobile device. It’s one of the reasons I ordered the Samsung Omnia Pro but that project is about to be canceled now that I’ve had a chance to put things in perspective again. Big screens make for nice readability but are a false friend on a 24/7 buddy device. High pixel density on a small screens looks impressive but don’t work well for an optimal web experience. The concept of a totaly converged device is flawed in that respect. Start thinking about navigation, ebooks, video playback and finger sizes and it seems even more flawed to converge everything!

Based on that, i’m back firmly into my original strategy of smaller buddy phone and dedicated web-focused MID, if I can find it!

You may be different. Have your say in the poll and let me know in the comments.

[poll id="3"]

As time goes on, more and more of my time is being taken up reading very interesting smartphone news. WVGA, Android, WM6.5 and Cortex are the important keywords and every time a device comes up it becomes clearer that the push towards the MID market is greater from the Smartphone manufacturers than it is from the Intel-based MID and UMPC market. With Menlow in a strange UMPC-like state (with no Moblin support now) there’s a long wait until consumer-focused MIDs come out on the Moorestown platform in 2010. It’s even clearer than before that ARM will have the upper hand in the MID space in 2009 by building up from existing products and brands that already sell millions of devices. Intel will have to sit back and wait for the time being.

Today has been particularly active in the ‘MIDPhone’ space.

As I was updating myself on the status of my Samsung Omnia order (no delivery date in sight) I took a quick look at other options that are available and the Toshiba TG01 (soon available in the U.S.) jumped up at me. With a screen size of 4.1”, a resolution of 800×480 and  processing power that is 2-4 times as much as the Nokia N800 / N810, it’s difficult to ignore. Pricing is now under 500 Euro for an unlocked version and 02 in Germany are selling it for 150 Euro with a 25 Euro / month contract. Add 15 Euro on top for Internet and you’ve got an interesting option that you I could walk out and buy tomorrow. Chris over at SlashGear has just finished his review and although he wasn’t impressed with the UI and predicts that the WM operating system could be an issue, I still think that the device represents great value for mobile internet fans. When Windows Mobile 6.5 comes along it could make it even more interesting, especially if Opera 9.7 works on it. I’m looking forward to seeing some browsing speed tests on this one. Note: No keyboard!

As I was finishing up reading Chris’ article a news item about an HTC Leo popped up. The Ai.rs blog has posted what they say are the specifications for this new HTC device. I don’t know who Ai.rs are but everyone seems to be following up the story. WMPowerUser (a blog I frequent more and more these days) says that the device is the HTC Firestone. All I know is that it’s rumored to have a 4.3” screen and run a Snapdragon platform at 1Ghz. This is definitely another one to add to the MID list. Again, it looks like there’s no keyboard.

Only a few minutes later I read the news that the Samsung Mondi is launching. The Mondi is an even bigger device with a slider form factor and a 4.3” screen. Samsung are dropping a WiMax module inside and handing it over to Clearwire for a launch in Las Vegas. It’s an ARM11-powered device running Windows Mobile again. No pricing, No availability details. Style and feature-wise it’s not too exciting and in fact it doesn’t even support voice so this is really focused at mobile internet activities.

The Mondi’s compact design provides the user with a more mobile form factor and ease-of-use than the typical laptop or netbook. While it is small enough to fit into the user’s hand or pocket, the Mondi packs an impressive Web browser, powered by Opera 9.5, which takes full advantage of the device’s 4.3-inch touch screen.

I’d like to see this with HSPA, Android, a high-end CPU and a big fat battery for all-day mobile internet use!

Press release. Via.

Finally, in addition to all that, there’s news about a Sony Xperia X3 which had previously been known at ‘Rachael.’ Dutch blog ‘All About Phones’ found the information in an Expansys we page and it’s quite the interesting read, largely because it’s going to be running Android and will have a 4” 800×480 screen. As yet, the CPU information is unknown. If you’re thinking about an HTC Hero, you might want to wait for final specs and pricing on this one.

Breaking: Xperia X2 news is coming in

None of these devices represent the ultimate MID yet but you can see where things are going. The 4” to 5” space is getting very busy already. I’ll beadding some of these (if not all!) to the database very soon.