You’ve heard about their growing popularity, you’ve seen them on airplanes -  in this challenging economic climate, the rise of the ‘netbook’ is one of the few recent bright spots in the computer hardware space.   We’ve written about netbooks before - optimized for portability, low price,  and long battery life, these smaller, less expensive laptop computers fill a niche between the smartphone and the full-powered notebook - and they’ve have had that market pretty much all to themselves.

Until now, that is - witness the emergence of a entirely new category of machine (with accompanying acronym): the “MID” (Mobile Internet Device).

Let’s review.  The ‘notebook‘ or ‘laptop‘ computer was created to provide as complete a desktop workstation experience as possible in a portable form.  Although hardware limitations initially made the laptop a second-best computing solution, technical advances over the past few years have more than leveled the playing field: as the average laptop has become powerful (and dependable) enough for the average user, sales have steadily increased.  In fact, in 2008,  laptop computers outsold desktop computers for the first time (and the trend continues: in Q1 2009, desktop sales were down 23% while laptop sales were up 10%).

But what does “a desktop workstation experience” require?  A fast x86 (i.e. Intel or AMD) processor and lots of memory, for one thing - because as Moore’s Law has brought us increasingly powerful semiconductors, software developers have written increasingly ‘heavy’ applications and operating systems to take advantage of all those transistors.   The problem is, all that internal hardware makes for a heavier machine, and all those CPU cycles take electricity - and unfortunately, there’s no Moore’s Law for battery technology  (just ask the car makers, or for that matter, the laptop owner whose pickup truck caught fire).  So while the laptop is a hit for many home users who may only have to go mobile occasionally, it’s not an optimal solution for purely mobile use.

 
Enter the netbook. Essentially a baby laptop, it does away with features such as large hard drives and CD/DVD drives in return for lighter weight, longer battery life, and lower price.  While the typical netbook CPU is also lower-powered, it’s still usually x86-based - for a while, it seemed like this was just the market opening Linux (the open source x86-compatible unix OS) was waiting for.  However, it turned out folks (folks in America at least) still liked their Windows apps - so despite the absence of a suitably lightweight Microsoft OS at the time, Windows remained the operating system of choice (the recently retired XP Home operating system enjoyed a somewhat unexpected second  life as the unofficial Microsoft netbook operating system).  With the Vista era now coming to a close, though, expect to see a lightweight version of Windows 7 optimized for netbooks (although the relatively thin margins of the netbook space will take some getting used to in Redmond).

 
Still further down on the computational food chain, a new category of device is now emerging - so new, in fact, there’s not yet a firm consensus on the name, although “MID” (Mobile Internet Device) seems to be the top contender.

If the netbook is a baby notebook, the MID is a baby netbook.  What distinguishes the Mobile Internet Device  are the primarily web-based use cases: web browsing, email, and (perhaps most importantly) streaming media.  Since the MID’s operating system is doing less, it ’s less of a differentiating issue.  What is a differentiating issue, though, is the quality and performance of  the hardware, so let’s talk about that.  Since these machines are even smaller than netbooks, they often use embedded “systems on a chip” (central processor, flash memory, and an 1080p HD video controller all on a single piece of silicon).  As for the processor itself, there are now other architectures to consider since there’s no need to run Windows applications.  In fact, several companies are actively developing “systems on a chip” based on the ARM processors powering the Blackberry, iPhone, and many of the nascent  internet-enabled televisions (such as those from LG).  Intel, for its part, is not ceding the MID market: the Yahoo! Connected TV initiative is based on Intel’s CE3100 chip and boasts an impressive list of partnerships of its own - look for these chips to show in Mobile Internet Devices as well.

OK.  Enough about processor architecture.  Let’s have some fun, let’s go MID shopping…

• Apple Although the company is being typically secretive about its future plans, rumors of an Apple MID currently under development and scheduled for release in time for the holiday have been floating around for months now.  We’ve written about it here - the device is said to be a 6″ by 8″ iTouch.  In short, “insanely cool”, as Mr. Jobs likes to say.   

• Dell The Wall St. Journal reports that Dell is working on an “iTouch-Killer”.  The device is expected to be larger than the iTouch - that (along with the absence of Apple’s proprietary iTunes functionality) would suggest the device could be considered more of an MID than merely another iPod competitor.   Also of interest (especially since this is Dell we’re talking about) is the choice of operating system - Google’s Android - and processor - ARM.

• Crunchpad Michael Arrington, founder of Techcrunch (a popular blog covering technology startups) is behind this initiative, which is reported to be nearing production readiness. Since Crunchpad is currently in stealth mode, details are hard to come by, but an early prototype was running on an Intel Atom netbook processor. Here’s a photo of the latest prototype and a video of an earlier prototype in action.

  


 
 

• Nvidia, best known for graphics controllers and chipsets, is now branching out into the “system on a chip” (SoC) business.   The company has developed a technology by the name of Tegra, which is notable in that it will support both Microsoft’s smartphone OS (Windows Mobile) as well as Google’s competing open Android system.  At the recent Computex show in Taipei, several working MID prototypes using Tegra were shown:

 
 
The MID market is still nascent, but imagine a scenario in which the cost of these realtively inexpensive devices were partially or entirely subsidized by service plan subscriptions - there could be an awful lot of them sold, and in a hurry.