Thirty-six years ago, Alan Kay, a computer scientist, published a rough sketch of his Dynabook portable computer, establishing the ideal of ever more intimate personal computers.
During the next decade, Kay’s tablet design, at 9 inches by 12 inches by 3/4 inch, morphed into today’s ubiquitous laptop form-factor -- a term used by consumer electronics specialists to describe the different sizes of various gadgets.
Since then, there has been a proliferation of gadgets of every size and shape, but to date only one other form-factor has established itself as a generic one: the palm-size or hand-held device that began as the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant designed by the Palm Computing co-founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. An endless array of popular products, from BlackBerrys to iPhones, are descended from the Palm.
This portable world is now neatly broken into gadgets that fit comfortably in your pocket and devices that snuggle equally comfortably on your lap.
Is there room for a third category? Perhaps a new class of consumer gadgets that fits somewhere between hand-held and laptop?
For want of a better description, I propose that we label this jacket-pocket form-factor the iMoleskine, after the Hemingway-esque notebooks that writers favor.
To date, the best example of the proto-Moleskine future is the Amazon Kindle book reader, which is the size of a paperback book. A quirky first-generation effort, the device has been criticized as having an odd user interface design and a flickering display. Because of the company’s endless front-page promotional efforts on its Web store, however, the Kindle seems headed for nichedom.
Intel certainly wants us to believe that there is more room in the middle.
In April, at a splashy forum in China for developers, the company initiated its effort to create a category for Mobile Internet Devices, or MID’s, for those of this middle size. If you remember
Microsoft’s abortive effort around the Ultra Mobile PC brand in early 2006, you will have a good sense of the size of an MID (though it wasn’t called one). Introduced with a painfully hip viral marketing campaign called Oragami, the initial round of UMPC’s landed with a resounding thud. Entering text and moving the pointer on the screen were laborious, and text was so tiny as to be unreadable. (New York Times News Service)
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