An interesting article on the death of the Ultra Mobile PC.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31899/113/
The UMPC dies. And no one notices.
By Wolfgang Gruener
Thursday, May 03, 2007 17:32
I will have to make a prediction here, but as of now the UMPC feels like the Tablet PC all over again. It isn’t hard to imagine that the UMPC will end up in a market niche and replace the Tablet PC, which once was projected to revolutionize the notebook. Will the mass market care? No. It hasn’t care until now and will not care then.
For the consumer, it gets more interesting. Intel has MIDs (Mobile Internet Device) in mind, with a price tag of about $500, much less memory than a UMPC, flash memory instead of a hard drive and a very lean operating system. Intel is currently designing a new 45 nm processor, code-named “Silverthorne” for these devices (and future UMPCs). Silverthorne is said to be about as fast as a Pentium M four years ago and cost about as cost-efficient to manufacture as a 286 CPU.
As a result, Silverthorne will not be able to run Windows Vista, according to Kedia. In fact, the MIDs Intel is currently showcasing are running Ubuntu Linux and not Windows. Kedia said that initial MIDS will definitely be running some version of Linux, but the company is also talking to Microsoft to offer “some” version of Windows for the MID.
As an example for an early MID, Kedia pointed to Apple’s iPhone which is rumored to integrate several Intel components.