More MIDs
It's already looking like the MID (mobile internet device) will be the theme of this year's Mobile World Congress - the event of the year for the mobile handset industry.
We've already had NVIDIA jumping on the bandwagon and now LG has announced its commitment to Intel's Moorestown platform - a system-on-chip that claims to use ten times less power than Atom or Intel's current MID platform, Menlow.
There's nothing to get too excited about right now, however, as Moorestown is still not expected to make an appearance until 2010, but this looks like being the year technology vendors position themselves for the fight over the MID market (no pun intended), much as they have been over netbooks for the past year or so.
Intel has been trying to plug the MID concept for quite a while now and Moorestown was first mentioned back in 2007. But MIDs have yet to capture the popular imagination and there's still no sign of Moorestown. In the meantime the ARM-based iPhone has redefined the smartphone category and netbooks, albeit mostly running on Intel CPUs, have occupied a lot of the market Intel might have hoped would be claimed by MIDs.
Of course there are supposed to be unique advantages of having a MID/smartphone based on full x86 architecture in enabling the full PC experience to be delivered in a hand-held, but that doesn't seem to have inhibited the evolution of the iPhone too much.
