The multimedia mid-market device melee

Two interesting new articles indicate a potential new zeitgeist. First, TechCrunch wants a web tablet:

I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

And another NYT article describing the emerging micro-laptop :

A Silicon Valley start-up called CherryPal says it will challenge the idea that big onboard power is required to allow basic computing functions in the Internet age. On Monday it plans to introduce a $240 desktop PC that is the size of a paperback and uses two watts of power compared with the 100 watts of some desktops.

It wants to take advantage of the trend toward “cloud computing,” in which data is managed and stored in distant servers, not on the actual machine.

Every few years the "extra thin client" play comes along, its been around since PC's were called microcomputers, and the idea was always that the network would be the computer. However this has always - to date anyway - foundered on the eventual realisation that the server/network/cloud is not reliable enough, a point ironically brought home by the simultaneous failure of Amazon's S3 cloud.

The other approach to this micro-PC market is via the beefed up mobile / PDA, and as RWW notes, its now game on between Apple and Nokia.

Now we did a feasibility study of such a multimedia device a few years ago, when everything was quite a bit more expensive - and it was feasible then, so its been curious to me since then that despite all the Convergence conversations, manufacturers have by and large not stepped up to the plate, until very recently.

The reason was probably economic - all our research at the time implied although there was huge latent demand for such devices, what was harder was to work out how it could be particularly profitable as device margins here will be wafer thin, and the incumbents were all making more money doing what they did at the time. However, all those markets are now overcompeted, driving startups and various existing manufacturers into this new arena

In this game, we thought it unlikely the traditional mobile ploy of device + large and long lasting contract would work if it was competing with the PC market's fairly unfettered sales model (except for all the onboard crapware of course, but that may be receding).

Clearly some form of offset funding will very likely emerge at this point of the market, its just hard to predict which.

Update - interesting take by Confused of Calcutta arguing that these devices will have a similar impact to the low cost PC in developing countries. Connection charges are another issue that holds these areas back, however.