For the last day of my MID Moves tour, I’m changing course and skipping the theme park. Rather than track down more mascots or try to balance devices on more inanimate objects, I’ll be talking to real people at places without rollercoasters to find out what they think about the OQO Model 2+, BenQ S6, Willcom/Sharp D4, and Intel-based MIDs/UMPCs in general.
I plan to chat with different types of people in different kinds of places to get spontaneous reactions and thoughts from those who don’t spend their time immersed in technology, those who have most likely never heard of MIDs/UMPCs, those whose support is needed for this class of devices to ever achieve mainstream success.
I don’t have a firm route in mind yet, but a hotel lobby (travelers/tourists), Starbucks (mobile professionals), and mall (locals) should be good places to find a decent cross-section of potential MID consumers.
Ask them how much time that a battery should last in such a device (notable as 3 hours is about tops on the oQo stuff it seems).
Hmmm, per this interview, it seems that one person in tech “gets it” that what we really want is 20 hours of use per battery charge.
See:
Reshaping the Laptop Market
http://www.bigthink.com/business-economics/11931
quote: “…at the low end you just want to use whatever is a pretty low cost CPU and turn it off most of the time because why use it if somebody is just typing an email or thinking or surfing the web or writing a paper and thinking about what they’re going to say? They don’t need it. What they really care about is their battery lasting for 20 hours, especially for the developing world, but in the developed world as well”.
Ask folks about this! What do they think?
Hmmm, Maybe you should interview Mary Lou to see what future that the tech explained has in the MID devices in the future?