{"id":778,"date":"2008-01-08T14:52:52","date_gmt":"2008-01-08T21:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alertnerd.com\/blog\/?p=778"},"modified":"2008-01-08T14:52:52","modified_gmt":"2008-01-08T21:52:52","slug":"the-umpc-begets-the-mid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=778","title":{"rendered":"The UMPC Begets the MID"},"content":{"rendered":"

You probably don’t recall–hell, I barely recall yesterday, let alone two years ago–but in the early days of Alert Nerd, I wrote about<\/a> the Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC). The specs and prototypes looked sexy; the products turned out to be way overpriced and made zero blips on the consumer electronics radar.<\/p>\n

(And yet, Asus makes a big splash in geek circles with their Eee PC, taking some of the same principles and marrying them to a very small laptop form factor. Hmm. All these crazy kids should talk more.)<\/p>\n

Now apparently, the UMPC has given birth<\/a> to the MID<\/a> (Mobile Internet Device). Those who followed Nokia’s Internet Tablets over the past couple years (I owned one, for a couple days, back in June of last year) may be familiar with the concept–web access, IM, e-mail, games, music, movies, and other ephemeral crap, all crammed onto a PYT of a device. Lookit, picture!<\/p>\n

intelpro_main.jpg<\/p>\n

I’d been skimming over lots of this year’s CES coverage, as I just can’t get a boner over big TVs and GPS units. But this…this is a horse of another color.
\n
\nI’m enough of a gadget whore to be intrigued. As always, I wonder about the true utility of such a device. They’re clearly horning in on Nokia’s “market” (such as it is) for the Internet Tablet, but adding in lotsa bling and probably an assload of media functionality–basically, a big phat iPod Touch. Do people want this? I do, but I have no idea why.<\/p>\n

(The iPod Touch, by the way, is incredibly sexy; I played with one over the holidays. Again, I have no use for it whatsoever–the hard drive’s way too small and I get websites just fine on my phone–but man. That Safari browser runs like a motherfucker, and the YouTube? Oh, to DIE FOR.)<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I pray for the day when my income increases to the point where I can drop a couple hundred on something so useless just to enjoy in the privacy of my own home. Until then, I will gape in awe at the teases on the internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You probably don’t recall–hell, I barely recall yesterday, let alone two years ago–but in the early days of Alert Nerd, I wrote about the Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC). The specs and prototypes looked sexy; the products turned out to be way overpriced and made zero blips on the consumer electronics radar. (And yet, Asus makes a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","category-teh-intarweb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}