It’s expected that the N450 will launch in October of this year at the very earliest.
MIDs have not taken off, even though Intel Corp. showed several designs at CES in January and Samsung announced Mondi, the first WiMax-enabled MID, at the International CTIA Wireless conference in March.
But Vesa Kiviranta, vice president of Elektrobit Corp., or EB, which is based in Oulu, Finland, believes there is a strong future for the seemingly competing bedfellows. The company last week announced a MID reference device at Computex Taipei based on Intel's second-generation MID processor, codenamed Moorestown.
The reference device will be sold to equipment manufacturers and wireless operators who will customize the design, adding features or leaving some out, before selling them to the public, perhaps in 2010, Kiviranta told Computerworld. "We're at the very early stage, but in less than year you'll see products." He would not disclose any customers, but said discussions are under way.
The reference device will reduce development time and costs for device manufacturers, EB believes.
The company published photos of the design, showing it at 5.7 x 2.8 x .53 inches in size, making it is small enough to fit in a pocket. The touchscreen on the device is about four inches diagonally. It runs Linux and supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and WiMax or HSPA broadband. Other details, including eventual pricing, were not available.
With a screen at 3.97 inches, the design fits into the MID category, with smartphones deploying screens smaller than 3.9 inches and netbooks offering screens larger than 5 inches, Kiviranta said.
He said manufacturers will work with a "full technology package" that EB will help them customize. EB provides a description of the circuit board, mechanical design, antenna design, the Linux software and more.
Kiviranta said that MIDs have not emerged in the market faster because "many technical issues prevented advancement" including problems reducing power consumption, and even the lack of flat-rate data plans from carriers. But the MID is committed to the idea of a device that is "data-centric, always on, and pocketable."
Wireless options are improving. Clearwire now operates mobile WiMax service in Portland, Ore., and Baltimore and expects to launch in 80 markets by 2010. And AT&T announce last week it would be upgrading its HSPA 3G by the end of the year to double the theoretical bandwidth to 7.2Mbps. EB, which last year had $200 in revenues, has access to 2,000 engineers and has the size and ability to work with multiple equipment customers at one time, Kiviranta said.
"We are putting a lot of effort into the MID," he said. Kiviranta said he has heard some describe the MID market as asleep, but said: "I worked on smartphones in the past and people said the same thing before they did so well."
-----------------------------"We're not yet in [volume] production. We're getting close," Chandrasekher said, declining to be pinned down on a precise date. The chips are currently available in samples, he said.
During his speech, Chandrasekher was joined on stage by executives from hardware makers Inventec Appliances, Quanta Computer and Elektrobit, who all have working handheld devices based on the chips. The devices were all running the Moblin 2.0 version of Linux and are expected to hit the market early next year, company executives said.Engineers managed to get the three devices working and ready for Computex in less than two months, a source familiar with the situation said, adding that Intel originally hoped to show five working prototypes at the show.
While Moorestown is nearing volume production, the current MID platform -- called Menlow -- continues to be used in new designs, a trend that is likely to continue into next year and overlap with the availability of Moorestown, Chandrasekher said.
-----------------------------At this year's COMPUTEX, NVIDIA is banging the MID drum yet again, and is showing off the fruits of those earlier design wins in the form of over 20 Tegra-based mobile devices that range in form factor from smaller MIDs to netbooks. I'll tackle the issue of Tegra in netbooks in a separate post, but as far as the Tegra-based MID goes, this is probably NVIDIA's fight to lose.
One form factor, two rationales, two acronyms, two marketsIntel's case for the x86-based MID/Ultramobile PC (UMPC) form factor is built around two potential usage scenarios, one for enterprise and one for consumers. The enterprise scenario is what I'll call the "legacy Windows app in your pocket" scenario, and the idea behind it is that there are all of these special-purpose enterprise Windows applications that companies would like to deploy away from the desktop, but without having to buy anyone a laptop just to run a single app. An example here would be some custom in-house Windows app that a FedEx worker might use to track inventory as he wanders around a warehouse, or a data collection app written in Access that a franchise manager would use in the course of an on-site audit of a retail location.
So in this first use case, you don't need to run Windows on the go—you just need to run one specific Windows app on the go, hence the idea of purchasing a cheap UMPC and turning it into a portable, single-purpose widget that lets you deploy this one Windows app across an entire mobile workforce at a very low cost. (For such applications, Intel prefers the term UMPC to MID, though the hardware is basically the same.)
Intel's second, consumer-focused usage scenario is centered around Linux and is aimed at wireless carriers. The idea here is that a wireless company in Europe or Asia (they're not aiming at the US market with this yet) will offer an (x86-based) entertainment and connectivity device that runs a customized, carrier-branded Linux distro and connects to the wireless network. Customers can buy these to surf the Web, download music, and play videos, and they essentially function like giant cell phones. Both Intel and NVIDIA agree on calling this second, consumer-focused device a "MID."
(Incidentally, what both of these scenarios have in common is that they envision the MID/UMPC as an application-specific device, and not as a general-purpose computing platform that can provide a scaled down version of a desktop experience.)
Tegra isn't going to hurt the enterprise usage scenarios—the tanking economy has probably already done that one in, since nobody has room in their IT budget for an experiment like that. But I can't imagine that Tegra will not blow a big, fat hole in the second, consumer-focused scenario. Tegra is bound to be a better fit in every conceivable way—performance, battery life, features—for a wireless, Linux-based MID/portable media player (PMP) than anything x86-based. This will be even more true once Adobe is done porting Flash and AIR to ARM (more on this in the next article).
Vendors like Compal, who now are making MIDs and netbooks based on both Atom and Tegra, will figure out shortly that you get more media playback performance per watt from an ARM product like Tegra than you do from anything Intel is selling, and because it's running a customized Linux distro anyway the carriers won't care that it can't run Windows.
It's also the case that there is a huge ecosystem of ARM-based media SoCs out there to choose from, so if they don't like Tegra they can pick something else. Given that reality, why would they hitch their wagon to x86, where Intel is the only vendor with a SoC part?
It looks likely that in the long-run, the Windows-based netbook is the only place where mobile x86 is truly compelling, at least until Intel gets close enough to performance/watt parity with ARM offerings that it can win on price.
-----------------------------"The mobile computing revolution has arrived," said Nvidia's mobile business general manager Michael Rayfield, in a statement. "These new Tegra-based products combine excellent Internet and media capabilities, always-on operation, and wireless connectivity for the un-tethered Internet experience consumers have been craving."
Nvidia's Tegra platform combines a CPU, HD video processor, and a low-power Nvidia GPU, and the company claims they achieve up to five times the power efficiency of existing products,. In fact, Nvidia says Tegra systems can play music for up to 25 days or push 1080p video for up to 10 hours on a single battery charge—and if saving power isn't your worry, the systems can play games at up to 46 frames per second. The systems will also be able to support Wi-Fi, 3G, and WiMax networking in order to delivery a truly mobile media experience.
One example of a Tegra-powered device is the Mobinnova élan, a netbook weighing les than two pounds with an 8.9-inch display, Wi-Fi and 3G networking, integrated Webcam, fanless operation, and 720p video support. Mobinnova is also showing its T8 tablet at Computex, which features a 10.1-inch touchscreen, HDMI and VGA video output, an integrated GPS. Although the companies note the systems can view Microsoft Office and Adobe documents, don't expect these systems to be running any flavor of Windows—at least not right out of the gate.
Neither Nvidia or its partners have announced when they expect Tegra-based systems to begin hitting consumer markets, but its a good bet at least some of the equipment makers want these products in retailers' hands before the end-of-year holiday buying season commences.
-----------------------------"This strategic collaboration demonstrates our continuing efforts to deliver superior user experience on MIDs based on Intel Architecture" says HS Lee, country manager of Intel Korea. "Through Intel's Moorestown platform, together with Moblin compliant OS platform and software eco-system from Infraware and SK Telecom, we expect that users will have more advanced internet experiences on MID."
"The collaboration is a testament to our achievements and ambitions in the mobile arena." said Kwan Hee Kang, CEO of Infraware. "This represents the next phase of our growth and will take Infraware beyond our traditional boundaries and enable us to maintain our technological leadership. We believe Intel's business cooperation and strategic investment will help elevate the appeal of our products and technologies."
"Through this strategic alliance, we will provide MID market with differentiated next-generation Web service as well as a global open market service," said Sungchul Hong, NI buginess mroup Manager of SK Telecom.
The product will be showed at CES 2010; and the planned timeline for the commercialization is the first half of next year.
-----------------------------So Symbian, newly rebranded as the Symbian Foundation, is plotting a comeback. While Symbian still has the largest market share for smartphones, the operating system may soon be running on a wide range of other electronic devices, including netbooks, global positioning systems, e-readers, and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), handheld gadgets just larger than smartphones. "There's a lot of interest in netbooks," David Wood, a strategist for Symbian Foundation, tells BusinessWeek.com. "I've never been as busy and rushed off my feet in my entire life. We are seeing a lot of early experimentation." Cell-phone maker Nokia (NOK) acquired all rights to Symbian last year.
Appealing to Computer MakersWood is quick to caution that it's still not clear how soon Symbian will make its break into new machines and which ones will carry the operating system. But if successful, the strategic shift would pit Symbian in new ways against software vendors as varied as Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG)-backed Android, and the open-source Linux Foundation. It would also bring Symbian into the orbit of additional electronics manufacturers other than Nokia (NOK), which today accounts for more than 90% of shipments of Symbian-based devices, according to analysts.
Symbian is embarking on a series of moves aimed at making itself more appealing to computer makers. For starters, it is tweaking the software to run more easily and cheaply on larger devices. "The goal is to open Symbian up to more manufacturers, because relying on just one vendor has only gotten them so far," says Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst at IDC.
New releases of the software, expected in the next year or so, will automatically adjust applications and images for larger screens—rather than just stretching them to fit a space, which can cause distortions, Wood says.
Symbian engineers are also ensuring the software is compatible with a wider range of chips. A team from Nokia has managed to make the software work on Intel's (INTC) Atom chip, which powers most netbooks, Symbian Executive Director Lee Williams announced in an Apr. 16 blog. Already used in netbooks, Atom is expected to be used eventually in MIDs, smartphones, and other mobile gadgets.
Currently, Symbian runs only on chips designed for cell phones and made mainly by Qualcomm (QCOM) and Texas Instruments (TXN). Such chips can also be used in netbooks, but Symbian needs to work on Intel's processors if its backers want to tackle a bigger portion of the growing market for small computers.Symbian is following in the footsteps of other mobile operating systems, including Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows and Google's Android, which works on netbooks and MIDs as well as smartphones.
Nokia could use its ownership of the Symbian rights to make a push into netbooks and MIDs, competing with PC makers including Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL), Acer and Asus. In February, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told a Finnish journalist that the company won't rule out joining the netbook race. While sales of smartphones that can connect to the Net and handle e-mail are expected to surge 18% this year, sales of certain low-priced netbooks are expected to soar 50%.
In part, Symbian's move is a defensive one. Some analysts speculate that increased popularity of devices such as MIDs will eat into growth of smartphone sales. "Smartphones are starting to work like PCs, and PCs like smartphones," says Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, which is supporting a rival MID operating system called Moblin. "And netbooks and MIDs are actually [often] cheaper than smartphones." In a recent survey of 1000 U.S. adults by consulting firm ABI Research, almost 50% of respondents said they may buy an MID instead of a smartphone. MIDs could displace smartphones the way smartphones displaced Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), says Philip Solis, principal analyst at ABI. "People want to use the Internet on their phones, and they are moving to bigger devices," he explains.
Symbian's move into other devices may also be precipitated by wireless carriers' demands for new flavors of machines. To encourage greater wireless data usage, service providers have recently begun carrying and promoting a broader array of devices, such as netbooks. In Western Europe, wireless carrier stores already account for as many as 25% of all netbooks sales, according to IDC.
Nokia wouldn't comment on whether it may enter the new device categories. In February, "Kallasvuo responded that we never say never and that we consider and continue to evaluate a range of business opportunities actively," a Nokia spokesperson says in an e-mail. "There was no further comment or speculation on this topic specifically." But at a Nokia general meeting on Apr. 23, Kallasvuo said that, with the help of Symbian, Nokia plans to broaden the definition of the smartphone by expanding its features into new product categories.
To be sure, Symbian still has a ways to go. One challenge: Most netbook users prefer familiar Windows menus; more than 90% of netbooks sold today run Windows software. "While we can't comment [on] Symbian's plans, we remain confident our partners and consumers will continue choosing Windows," Don Paterson, director of marketing for Windows client at Microsoft, says via e-mail.
Symbian also needs further retooling so that it works as well on Intel's Atom as it does on other chips. "But I imagine that's the sort of thing a wider community [of developers] will want to get its teeth into," Wood says.
-----------------------------In the other blue corner is ARM, with a stronghold in the cell-phone market including the smart-phone market. All those 25,000 applications in the iPhone store run on ARM. Blackberries are ARM-based to, although just to add a wrinkle, manufactured by Intel (Intel acquired an ARM license when they acquired the semiconductor business of the old Digital Equipment Corporation, and renamed StrongARM to Xscale).
The battleground for the upcoming fight is the MID . These are notebook PCs with smaller screens and a much lower price point than a PC, but with larger screens than a smartphone. Intel with Atom is betting, along with Microsoft so far, that this market will demand windows binary compatibility and thus will require a Microsoft operating system and an x86 processor. ARM are betting that this is not true, that MIDs will hide the operating system, run new applications and so nobody will care what the underlying operating system will be. Which means that it will be some form of Linux such or perhaps Google’s Android (or if Apple enters this market as expected, OS-X which also Unix under the hood). Lurking around, of course, are the other smartphone operating systems, Symbian and Windows Mobile although they seem unlikely candidates for major success in the MID space (but primarily running on ARM in any case).
The really interesting wrinkle is whether Microsoft supports ARM with Windows 7 for this space. That would not give complete Windows binary compatibility but if Office was available (not just the operating system) that could be a very compelling compromise. Intel would be the big loser of this since Atom has poor power consumption and higher cost and really its only attraction is backwards compatibility with full-size PCs.
The big downside to Microsoft of supporting ARM, apart from the engineering cost, is the fallout it would likely provoke with Intel. But Microsoft has done this before when, while publicly committed to Itanium, they ported Windows to 64-bit x86 with AMD. By the way, this was done using Virtutech virtualization technology (before I worked there) with the result that Windows64 booted successfully the first day silicon was available, an extraordinary achievement.
One other wrinkle is the manufacturing. ARM is, of course, available from a huge range of suppliers. Intel will build Atom-based parts but is not in the ASIC business. TSMC will build Atom-based parts based on their recent announcement. However, the TSMC press release talks of expanding the “Intel Atom’s availability for Intel customers” which may just be marketing getting the word Intel in as many times as possible, or really may mean some serious restrictions on availability. Furthermore, the Atom is not a soft core and so can’t be prototyped in FPGAs. Whether this is a critical success factor remains to be seen. Based on my previous experience dealing with Intel, they won’t make any netlist available. Sometimes being paranoid to survive has its downside.
Lurking quietly in the 3rd corner of the microprocessor ring is PowerPC. This is heavily used in Avionics, automotive and networking (routers and cellular base-stations). It used to be the processor in the Mac, but Apple switched to Intel reportedly because they couldn’t persuade IBM to produce a low power PowerPC to keep Macbooks competitive. Both IBM and especially Freescale manufacture chips using it but somehow it is off the radar compared to ARM and Intel. One interesting facet is that Apple acquired PA Semiconductor who were developing a very low powered version of PowerPC. Apple are rumored to be producing chips embedding this processor so future Apple MIDs and possibly even future iPhones could end up with PowerPC, although it seems unlikely that Macs themselves will switch back due to the body of software that has just been expensively converted to Intel.
Ignoring the PowerPC (which at most may be a player with Apple) the bottom line is that Atom is more power-hungry and more costly (because it really is more expensive to manufacture) than ARM. Intel may be banking on getting a generation ahead in manufacturing process as a way to reduce both power and cost, but that won’t help anyone going through TSMC. ARM is much lower powered and so offers the prospect of a MID that has days of battery life (like the (ARM-based) Amazon Kindle has already, but with very different screen technology).
My gut feel is that a MID will be more like a souped up smartphone than a dumbed down PC, and so Atom will lose to ARM. In fact I think the smartphone and MID markets will converge. Microsoft will lose unless they port to ARM. There will be no overall operating system winner (like with smartphones). But a few minutes with Google will find you lots of people with an opposing view to mine.
-----------------------------The Moblin project is competing with other mobile Linux-based operating systems such as Google’s Android, Jolicloud and gOS. Moblin’s expected beta release date is still April, however we suspect there may be some slippage here. The Alpha release and pre-built images are available via the official site here. A full list of changes are attached after the jump.
The summary of changes are as follows:
Updated UI libraries (Clutter, etc.)
Updated Graphics subsystem with KMS early integration.
Updated Moblin system services
Support for the MSI Wind
Updated ConnMan with many improvements and bug fixes
Updated and enhanced boot process, inter-process, and package interactions.
Many updates to the OS libraries
updated XFCE (v4.6)
Updated to Kernel 2.6.29-rc7.
Gnome 2.26 RC release.
Updated Moblin Image Creator (MIC2).
Development for software and applications for Moblin.
SmartDevices announced some details of its SmartQ5 MID (Mobile Internet Device). The Samrt 5 wis powered by an ARM processor and features a 4.3-ich 800×480 touchscreen display. It supports WiFi 802.11b/ga and Bluetooth connectivity. USB Host is also supported.
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