The Attack of the MIDs will be in full swing soon, now that Intel has started shipping its Atom CPU and VIA is making hay with its C7-M CPU, so what will that mean? Are we moving into a exciting, new, dynamic market where technology now suddenly does more for us than it has before? Does it mean that computing will change forever? Does it mean we’ll all have tricorders in our pants and robots tending yard? The short answer is no. The slightly longer but still not quite as satisfying answer is we’re not quite there yet and what we have on our hands is the Second Coming of The Apple Newton MessagePad. Is that terrible? Yes and no. Read on and I will explain.

What is a MID? A MID is a Mobile Internet Device, a term coined by someone else whom I don’t care to lookup. It could have been Intel. It was Intel, in fact, which coined the term UMPC, or Ultra Mobile PC, which Microsoft later called its Origami Project. Much like the Tablet PC before it, people did not flock in sizable droves to purchase UMPCs with wild abandon. This is mostly because people don’t like them or find them useful. They are large, heavy, and cannot be closed to protect their screens. The market, indeed, is telling Microsoft what it wants. They do this by calling the large number of new micro-lappies UMPCs.

That is, after, what they are. It all started in earnest with ASUS’ Eee PC, a tiny sliver of a lappy, able to do just about anything as long as it didn’t require significant processor resources or touchtyping at over 100 WPM. Since the Eee PC shipped, there are now at least eight other competitors on the market, including products from HP and Dell, all of which are sub-US$800 systems, with most of them selling for under US$400. This brings us to the MID. The MID is what falls into the space being created for the pocketable PC. That idea which came to then Apple CEO John Sculley for a personal assistant which could go everywhere with you has come around again for another shot at the big time.

This time, however, Apple has already made their successful version and now others are trying to catch up. Its not just about the iPhone, though. Its about a range of different product technologies which are all coming together and finding that the technologies have improved enough to make certain technologies viable. In this case, its the MID; a convergence of the PDA, the mobile phone, the iPod, and a desktop computer. Yes, a desktop computer. Why? Because MIDs are capable of running Windows XP, various Linux distributions, and, in one case so far, even Windows Vista, though its not recommended. I would assume that by the time MIDs hit the market, someone will have hacked one to run Mac OS X, as well.

This is a compelling idea, yes? How could it not be compelling to be able to carry a full-sized desktop OS in your pocket and use it whenever you need, you say. That’s going to be a problem, though. Desktop OS are designed to be used with a mouse and a keyboard. We already know from the Tablet PC experiement that its actually more complicated to use a desktop interface with a pen and no keyboard, especially when entering data. That’s when using an interface designed for pen interaction becomes useful, but from years of experience with Palm and Windows CE based OS, I know that there’s a very limited amount of interaction you can have with a PDA OS.

It all comes down to data entry. If its going to be hard to enter data, then it won’t be used to enter data, and the MIDs will not fulfill their promise of a more powerful, portable computing platform. It will be another larger, faster PDA which uses more battery power and isn’t as convenient. Then again, I could be entirely wrong, and heaven knows I’ve been wrong before. The MID could be that bridge device which carries us into the next decade eyeing Star Trek’s science fiction concepts with confidence and swagger. Imagine a future where we get up in the morning, check out our news and answer our spam-free email, then grab our MID (which was acting as our desktop system in a cradle) and head out for the day.

We check movie times, verify our appointments with clients, set up a date with a GF or BF, plan a trip to Vegas with our pals, and all the while feel confident that we are computing in one place, with every iota of it being backed up constantly. That one place might just be our MID, a small, pocketable module which uses an Ultra Low Voltage CPU which still runs fast enough to run all major internet and office applications and is made even more powerful when connected to the home dock which adds a CPU, an optical drive, an additional hard drive for archiving and third-stage backup, and a video card to run an HD display. This rig will also allow you to make a receive video calls either at home on your big screen or while you’re out and about enjoying the fast and freeing WiMAX network.

Sadly, this is more a PR firms descriptive text than a possible reality. This IS, after all, what we want. This is not what we get, though. Competition prevents that from coming to fruition. To make such a device reality we would need to see technology sharing pacts between Intel, Microsoft, Apple, AMD, ASUS, Vonage, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Sun, EMC, Linux, and possibly the Pope. They’d all need to get together and say, “hey! Regardless of the fact that our individual survivial and success means that we must grind 2/3rds of you into the dirt within the next 20 years, we’d like to work with you to make this global computing environment a possibility within the next two years. Sound good?”

Yeah, right.

Among all of the other issues, I could see the entire Republican party having a simultaneous coronary and the FTC’s Antitrust department having some serious issues about all of this. Most of the companies in my incomplete list simply aren’t creative and forward-thinking enough to even be engaged in a part of such a conglomeration, much less spearhead it. So, in the end, the MIDs will just be another market niche. They will likely even sell well, though I predict they will sell more and offer more variants and models in Asian countries than here in the States. Ultra portables have long sold well in Japan and personal media players (the video kind) are very popular in Malaysia and South Korea.

In the meantime, Microsoft is busy making Vista the standard in the world and Windows 7 will just be larger and require more resources than Vista, completely the opposite of what a MID market needs. The best desktop OSes for MIDs are Windows XP, Mac OS X, and the king of the hill in embedded performance, Linux. Microsoft wants to kill XP dead, though, despite the fact that the market is making it plain and clear that it doens’t want to lose XP. Microsoft is making it equally clear that they don’t care what the consumer wants. Apple listened and produced the iPhone. If they ever make a larger, tablet-like one, then their MID will be perfect and complete. Linux already works perfectly well on a range of embedded systems.

So, again we are confronted with the truth that Microsoft isn’t interested in playing the game by the rules everyone else is cotent to play by. Not only will they not take their ball home so nobody can play, but they will replicate the ball and forcefully install it into every home in the neighborhood until people accept it as theirs. The telecoms are the same. Sprint has no interest in playing with Verizon or AT&T, and the latter two could care less about the others. It is their aim to win and not taking over the entire market is losing, so you see where we’re going there.

The reality is that no, MIDs will not be the tricorder, they won’t work like KITT, they won’t be an R2D2 to our Luke, and they won’t know how to make dinner reservations for us. They will be just another dumb tool which looks nice, costs a lot of money, and takes up space. Might as well get an iPhone and be done with it.

written by Tyler Regas