Designers Dreaming Up New Tiny, Mighty Internet Gadgets

posted by Ken Kaplan on December 05, 2008

Netbooks are proving to be the hot tech toy for the holidays.  I certainly want one -- I'm asking Santa tomorrow when I take the kids to our local Aviation Museum. 

Yet at the end of the year, my attention always turns to what's next.  And I really think a slew of new mobile Internet devices (MID) will top the wish list for 2009.  And I'm hoping to see new designs at CES in January.

When I first saw Intel's Ultra Mobile guru Pankaj Kedia with this this prototype MID, I thought:  that's trippy.  But then it got me thinking that it's all about design and functionality, and there is a vast array of styles needed to fit the many personalities we have in the world.
 

If the tiny, mighty Intel Atom processor could empower designers and engineers to raise the bar, soon we might have a variety of Internet devices that many of us just "gotta have."

My Intel pals in Czech Republic just wrapped up a contest pitting top university designers against each other in a race to design sleek, purposeful MID designs that some day might actually hit the market.

Here is the first and second place winning designs.



All of the competing designs can still be viewed here and on Technet.cz

Even as the HP Mini netbook stole the show at last month's Uber10, it was the MID prototype that caught the eye of Ubergizmo co-founder Hubert Nguyen inside San Francisco's club Mighty. Here's a video I captured of Hubert getting the inside scoop from Pankaj.

Click to play