Entelligence: The Muddled MID market
Posted in: column, Features, intel, ipod, ipod touch, IpodTouch, MID, Today's Chili
There’s a growing category of devices that fall in the space below laptops and above smartphones. It’s not a new space, there have been various incarnations over the years, most recently Microsoft’s Ultra Mobile PC devices, originally known as Origami. These days, Intel’s the one talking about this space, pushing what it calls MIDs, or Mobile Internet Devices. Well that’s all well and good — but what’s a MID?
Frankly, MID is an Intel marketing term coined around 2008. In a 2008 Engadget post Intel’s Dan Monahan described MIDs as having the following attributes:
- Consumer-class lifestyle devices
- Runs a ‘lightweight” OS with quick startup like Linux
- Optimized for things like media playback and web surfing
- In 2009 (or so) Moorestown-based devices will be classed as MIDs only
And Intel is aggressive about MIDs — the company was showing off so many of UMID’s devices at IDF last week you would have thought they were among Intel’s most strategic and largest customers. But it’s clear that the definition has changed over time, as the MIDs at IDF didn’t match the specs Mr. Monahan talked about in 2008. These devices all ran Windows and were really scaled down models of netbooks. And although they were impressively tiny, let’s be honest — I’m really skeptical about the future of this class of device, Intel’s aspirations aside.
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Filed under: Handhelds
Entelligence: The Muddled MID market originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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