Is is really that hard for a product designer to sit down and think about what sort of computing experience a product is going to provide a customer?

Thanks in part to devices like the Joojoo [Portal page] and the iPad [Portal page], Slate mania is officially underway. Everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon, and those that do — with Windows based devices — are going to fail in a big way. Why? Because the companies creating these products can’t accept one simple fact:

Windows computers require a usable mouse and keyboard to provide a good computing experience.

Whenever this point gets through the heads of the people making the decision to create products such as MSI’s Wind Pad 100, we’ll stop seeing these useless Windows based slates.

Slates are touchscreen computers that lack physical keyboards. Usually this lack of keyboard is compensated for with the addition of an active digitizer touchscreen which allows for some pretty darn good digital ink input. Many of the devices that we’re seeing from this upcoming wave of consumer slates, however, lack active digitizers and instead expect customers to deal with awful on-screen-keyboards. On-screen-keyboards can be pretty good with capacitive touchscreen, as we’ve seen with iPhone/iPad and Android devices, but we’ve yet to see one that works even a little bit well in Windows.

Because some companies can’t seem to just accept that Windows is completely reliant on a usable mouse and keyboard, we’re going to continue to see these $500 touchscreen slates with crappy in-house interfaces that sit ontop of Windows and have “touch” somewhere in the name. These interfaces are nearly always eye-candy at best, but somehow they exist as a feeble attempt to compensate for the fact that slates don’t have physical keyboards and often don’t have very usable mice either.

We’ve seen this same song and dance before during the early UMPC days. The Origami software, that Microsoft hoped would provide some awesome touchscreen experience on UMPCs, turned out to be relatively useless. You simply can’t coat Windows in a little bit of touchscreen interface and pretend that it suddenly makes the operating system useful for a Slate. Windows is a complicated and extremely deep operating system which has been relying on the mouse and keyboard paradigm for years and years. This means that the ridiculously huge library of software that has been created for Windows over the years is also reliant on a quality mouse and keyboard implementation. If customers can’t use the base operating system effectively without some crappy touch-interface layered on top (which doesn’t extend to that vast library of software), how is the device going to be even remotely useful for use with any of the software that is built with a usable mouse and keyboard in mind? The best UMPCs were those that had usable keyboards and mice (such as the Samsung Q1 Ultra and the Sony Vaio UX Series), not the ones that had poorly designed “touch” interfaces that we’re slapped ontop of Windows. The best UMPCs gave people keyboards and mice that worked, then got out of the way and allowed consumers to use their UMPCs like the little computers that they are. They didn’t try to emulate some ‘appified’ computing experience that people are currently enthralled with on high-end smartphones.

These horrible in-house “touch” overlays are going to have an even harder time than Origami did back in the early UMPC days. Why? Because devices like the iPad — which is similarly priced to many upcoming Windows slates — provides a computing experience that doesn’t rely on a physical keyboard and a mouse. It has a ground-up approach to the way that people interact with the computer. Simply having a Windows overlay that might play music and do a slideshow is not going to provide the utility that facilitates a useful computing device, and consumers are going to be begging for a mouse and usable keyboard, not the horrifically inefficient on-screen-keyboards that we’ve seen on Windows in the past.

For customers wanting full desktop PC capability in their hand, 2010 will be a frustrating year where you’ll see a lot of game-changing news, and very few products based on it.

On the positive side, Vista has been replaced by Windows 7, a much more efficient operating system that supports HD video decoding on the GMA500, native H.264 support, better tablet features and advanced networking. With fast SSD’s dropping in price we should see some exciting and capable devices based on this OS. On the negative side, Windows 7 is not as efficient as Windows XP and requires more memory, more processing and more storage at a time where platform performance will remain static. Intel’s Menlow, the only platform for advanced, long-battery-life UMPCs, will enter it’s third year of production but continue to be the only UMPC platform choice. Windows 7 will only be an option for high quality UMPCs and that could mean rising prices.

Moorestown, Intel’s next generation mobile computing platform is not expected to make an impact for UMPCs based on its unique position of (initially) being a Moblin-only platform. Moblin will develop of course and the release of version 2.1 for handhelds will be an interesting one that might reach across the Menlow platform. As Moblin for handhelds reaches launch, we will get a feel for it’s intended position in the market. We’re expecting a dynamic consumer focus rather than the productivity focus that UMPCs users want but this is a flexible OS and adding productivity components should be relatively easy, especially if the Intel application store takes off. A version of Moorestown that supports Windows will be announced in 2010 and it will allow UMPCs running desktop operating systems to shrink another 20% while gaining another 20% battery life but products using this may not appear in 2010. They could also be focused at the embedded market which puts a question-mark over price and small production runs for UMPCs.

Based on this awkward and risky matrix of old and new hardware and operating systems we expect the number of Windows-based UMPCs to drop and the advances in performance and battery life to be less dramatic compared to 2009. Expensive, highly targeted options will continue to appear (the newly announced Fujitsu UH900 is one example) and low-cost options will continue to find sales in Asia. We will see continued small-scale improvements with efficiency and better industrial design but we should not expect anything like the battery life advances we saw in 2009. Moblin-based UMPCs on the Menlow platform may appear which won’t offer any battery life savings but may allow manufacturers to offer low-end consumer-focused models in order to try and stimulate the market.

Screen technology (E.g. Pixel Qi) could make an impact and improve battery life (10-20% in normal use) but we only expect this to reach high-end UMPCs in 2010. We should also see the first capacitive touchscreens on Windows-based UMPCs in 2010. This will be driven by the multi-touch capabilities in Windows 7 and again, will only reach high-end UMPCs.

As Android stabilizes, matures, grows to support multiple screen sizes, starts to sell in significant numbers and attracts productivity-focused application developers, the operating system will become a valid productivity option. We see it scaling well to the 5-7″ screen and offering manufacturers a new choice for their productivity focused personal computers. The ‘power-gated’ platform (Intel terminology) that is already used by ARM-based platforms, is the only way forward for efficient, always-on’ handheld devices and until Moorestown is released, it gives the ARM-based designs a big advantage with battery life, active standby and weight. Maemo won’t be a serious contender in 2010 as it will focus on it’s development and transition towards Maemo 6. Look to 2011 for productivity-focused, large-format Maemo devices.

Unfortunately the platform that Maemo and Android runs on still needs to progress to the next generation before it can offer the processing power that can match X86-based UMPCs.  Multi-core Cortex-A9 based platforms are expected to reach production in 2010 but products won’t be in customers hands until 2011 meaning that in 2010, ARM-based devices will only be able to compete by offering longer battery life, lighter weight and active standby.

2010 will be the year that the Windows Desktop operating systems are shown to be limiting the progress of the UMPC. Sub-system power control is the only way forward if Intel want to compete with the ARM platforms and this is simply not compatible with Windows operating systems. The difference between battery life on Windows/Menlow and Moblin/Moorestown is going to be very significant and once OEMs see this, we’ll see a move away from Windows-based devices. At least for the pro-sumer UMPC market. Specialist business UMPCs running Windows 7 will remain.  2010 will be a year where a new generation of Linux-based UMPC products will be designed. Unfortunately, we may not see those until 2011.

2010 will see big turning points for hardware and software but most of these won’t reach consumers until 2011.

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.