UMPC, MID Alphabet Soup
Posted by: Cliff Edwards on April 18
Geez, I was just getting used to the unwieldy moniker UMPC for “ultra-mobile personal computers,” and now Intel has gone and ruined it.
The chipmaker at its spring developer forum in Beijing couldn’t leave well enough alone and seems to be expanding the category to include MIDs, or “mobile internet devices.”
What does it all mean? The big gorilla of the pc industry seems to be hoping that its failure to break into the cell phone market can be overcome by developing energy-sipping chips that power handhelds with screen sizes of 3 inches to 7 inches that have always-on connections to the Internet.
Now the trick will be convincing people when such devices roll out next year that in addition to paying for a cell phone and notebook pc, they should shell out another $500 to $2,000 for a MID or UMPC that can do much the same thing.
