Intel MID is one of the big news at the Intel Developer Forum and this UMPC-related concept has already appealed to many. MID is short for Mobile Internet Devices and unlike the UMPC concept which Intel launched together with Microsoft, MID is a lot more consumer-friendly. UMPCs have hardly been selling well and the high prices of these have certainly been one of the reasons. Intel has therefore decided to go for a slightly smaller devices with displays in the 4-6″ range instead of 5-7″ as with UMPC. But the smaller displays are far from the only thing that separates MID from UMPC.
Intel has decided to use a Linux-based operating system (Red Flag Linux), in contrast to UMPC which all use Windows XP or Vista. Another proof of that Intel is trying to keep the costs of MID as low as possible; in fact the entire platform is Open Source.
Intel has released some documentation for the MID platform, but also unveiled a number of prototypes, where the user interface has a touchscreen layout with large graphical icons. We will have to wait and see how the final MID units and the user interface will look like, but over at APC Mag they’ve published an article and a picture gallery covering Intel’s new mobile platform.
