it's interesting that a new class of mobile device is starting to appear on the horizon. what do we call these? pocketpc, taken. handheld, taken. palmtop, been said. i don't know - let's call them mini-PCs. either way they are pretty cool if they work. the basic idea, is a mini-handheld-pc that is your all in one, desktop that you plug into a keyboard and monitor at work and home, and have a fully functional PC OS on the road, with the ability to plug in mobile phone, data, and wifi cards.
one is made by tiquit and one is made by OQO that shows it's heritage of having an apple powerbook designer.
they remind me vaguley of the philips velo the first windows ce device i owned, which was semi useful at the time, but no desktop or laptop replacement - and in general this class of devices were a big flop.
it will be interesting to see if these companies can get any traction. i have a hard time thinking of a startup hardware manufacturer like this that tried to create a category buster and didn't die a painful death. they all run out of money. palm is one ( and you can argue they are dying a slow, painful death) but then they had the backing of 3com, didn't they?
a lot will depend upon price and execution, of course, but i could think of a few solutions that this could be used for, where the power of a pc is needed, but the professional is always on the go. the medical field primarily comes to mind.
big hardware companies with lots of cash can execute on these types of things and, i wish apple would do one of these with an OS X device.
Posted by Steve at January 21, 2004 06:03 PM | TrackBack