MIDs are less easy to steal than mobile phones or laptops, easies to use in restricted spaces like aircraft seats, easier to use than mobile phones for older people where 20-20 vision and dexterity are required, and with a Linux OS, neat.cool and awesome for teens and kids who need to be different from the older generation.

Initiatives like the XO and XO2 will drive the price down to the $100 mark, so that service providers will offer them free for a monthly connection plan, and others will provide pre-paid schemes.

Accessories will large screen, mouse and keyboard connection. USB provides removable storage, and Web2 provides online applications and storage.

Mark these words, MIDs are going to be the next best must have Internet and computing device.

The Windows desktop has never been under a greater threat. Their OS is so bloated it cannot run fully on the hardware. Win7 is supposed to be modular, but the market will be saturated with Linux before they are ready, and catch up is not a game they are any good at. Like the Ferrari F1 driver Massa, they only win if they are leading right from the start.

Mainstream users will not have a choice of XP for long - Microsoft is desperate to EOL it, and move everyone over to Vista. The home version has been extended past the end of this month, but the “professional” version is still going to unavailable except from rebel OEL’s after June 30. These MIDs, UMPC’s and whatnot really aren’t intended as XP platforms anyway, their resources being OK for a tweaked Linux but not for XP.

Win7 is still vaporware, with the latest marketspeak from Microsoft being it will be “like Vista, only moreso!”, and no word anymore of modularity. They are trying to encourage business users to migrate first to Vista and then to Win7, as migrating from XP and earlier directly to Win7 will be “too hard”. (In that event, why not migrate to Linux and get it over with?) I suspect we’re seeing the last few years of M$’s market dominance, and with it, the demise of shrinkwrapped proprietary software.

[...] Linux netbooks Jay Lyman, June 9, 2008 @ 1:12 pm ET I’ve written quite a bit recently about netbooks, MIDs, UMPCs and the general category of sub-notebook/greater-than smartphone, and while I had [...]

[...] [...]

[...] smaller devices. In a recent interview with the AP, Intel chief Paul Otellini says MIDs favor Linux.http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2008/06/06/netbooks-mids-whatever-its-about-lower-cost-linux…I4U Weekly Top 10: Sony HDR-CX12, GTX 280, MSI Wind I4U NVIDIA introduced the new high-end GTX 200 [...]

[...] be more skeptical if I wasn’t a believer in the opportunity from emerging netbooks, MIDs or whatever you call them. Even though its business model and operations may not be in keeping with the open [...]

[...] device that keeps coming up for me (new models, press calls, wife wants one) is the netbook, or whatever you want to call it. It’s got me wondering whether my Linux hopes for netbooks could be [...]

[...] Linux? Jay Lyman, September 5, 2008 @ 6:15 pm ET The technology and buzz keep on coming in the netbook space, which consists of lower-cost, smaller-size notebook computers (many of them Linux-based) [...]

[...] open platform. Still, as is often the case with open source software in the end, it’s about cost. The reason Intel is investing heavily in Linux for mobile Internet devices and emerging mobile [...]

[...] for Linux and the OS is also viewed as the more cost-competitive option by none other than Intel, which is integral in moving x86 computing and rich Internet experiences to mobile devices and [...]

[...] hope that vendors selling consumer PCs and netbooks running Linux will prominently display and detail that: ‘This is a Linux-based computer, and [...]

[...] said, netbooks, MIDs and increasingly other mobile and consumer devices are largely about cost and Freescale agrees that the netbook’s reliance on WiFi, rather than a costly data plan with [...]

Next netbook - thinner, cheaper, better, Linux…

I recently had a very interesting talk with Freescale’s Glen Burchers, director of global consumer marketing, regarding netbooks, where Linux stands with this emerging form factor and what we can expect to see as everybody and their grandma pushes inn…

[...] the mobile devices we’re using in a year or two, whatever they look like or whatever they’re [...]

[...] the mobile devices we’re using in a year or two, whatever they look like or whatever they’re [...]