Do You Have That Portable in a Midsize? Benq.

A remodelled variety that Intel calls Mobile Internet Devices, or M.I.D.’s, will include products similarly to these concepts from, clockwise from lower left, Elektrobit, Asus, Clarion, Aigo, Panasonic, LG, Lenovo and BenQ. During the next decade, Mr. Kay’s drop design, at 9 inches by 12 inches by 3/4 inch, morphed into today’s ubiquitous laptop form-factor — a denominate occupied by consumer electronics specialists to describe the different sizes of various gadgets.

Since then, there has been a rise of gadgets of every size and shape, but to date only one other form-factor has established itself as a generic one: the palm-size or hand-held ruse that began as the Pilot personal digital assistant designed by the Palm Computing co-founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. An incessant array of predominating products, from BlackBerrys to iPhones, are descended from the Palm. This portable world is now neatly demoralized into gadgets that fit comfortably in your pocket and devices that snuggle equally comfortably on your lap.

Is there office for a third category? Perhaps a new class of consumer gadgets that fits somewhere between hand-held and laptop? For want of a better description, I propound that we label this jacket-pocket form-factor the iMoleskine, after the Hemingway-esque notebooks that writers favor. To date, the best norm of the proto-Moleskine days is the Kindle book reader, which is the size of a paperback book. A quirky first-generation effort, the seal has been criticized as having an odd user interface design and a flickering display. Because of the company’s unbounded front-page promotional efforts on its Web store, however, the Kindle seems headed for nichedom. certainly wants us to credence in that there is more room in the middle.

Last month, at a splashy forum in China for developers, the assembly initiated its effort to create a category for Mobile Internet Devices, or M.I.D.’s, for those of this halfway size.

If you remember ’s abortive effort around the Ultra Mobile PC identify in early 2006, you will have a good sense of the size of an M.I.D. (though it wasn’t called one).

Introduced with a woefully hip viral marketing campaign called Oragami, the endorse round of U.M.P.C.’s landed with a resounding thud.

Entering text and inspiring the pointer on the screen were laborious, and text was so tiny as to be unreadable. Still, Intel has persevered, arguing that there is a “use case” — the technology work loves jargon — based on the intersection of increasingly attainable broadband wireless networks and the Web. We are going to want the Web wherever we are. Think location, location, location.

As a consequence, the Intel executives assert, the small cellphone display, which was mythical for viewing an 11-digit phone number or several lines of e-mail or wording messaging, will be relentlessly stretched like taffy in all directions. A cynic might maintain that the real reason for Intel’s sudden enthusiasm for the M.I.D. stems from the reality that its recently introduced Atom microprocessor is stuck in a no man’s nation between laptop and cellphone chips.

It will be another two years before Intel has a sliver that will bring the Windows-compatible world to the palm of your hand. So, what to do for now, if your chips are too power-hungry to wrest into the cellphone market, currently dominated by microprocessor chips licensed from ARM, the British fragment company? If you have lemons, make lemonade! Initially, however, I bought into the M.I.D. idea.

It seemed that stingy screens and pico-size keyboards were catastrophic matched for the ubiquitous Web. A slim paperback book-size computer, peradventure with a Bluetooth headset to transform it into a mobile phone, might comprise the ultimate Dynabook. The sticking trait in that argument is that laptops themselves are relentlessly slimming down.

If you’re carrying a backpack, you can now decide among a range of ultralight laptops from , , and , as well as newcomers adulate Asus that are less noticeable than the four- and five-pound bricks of just a year ago. Indeed, the hottest grouping is machines like the Asus Eee PC and Everex Cloudbook, which sit on the dividing ancestry between the laptop and M.I.D. worlds.

Currently the Eee PC has a 7-inch screen and a keyboard that is just a share too small to be really comfortable. My guess is that this kind of sub-ultralight laptop will grow toward a small screen size of 9 or 10 inches and become thinner — moving in a laptop direction. To be sure, the caveat in all of this is that Intel may be decent in Asia, where space is at much more of a premium than it is in the United States.

There are also unrestricted cards like voice recognition that might change the equation, but conversational voice interaction with a carriable computer is still probably half a decade or more in the future. At one time, I brainstorm that an M.I.D.-size slate might prove the perfect compromise: a jack-of-all-trades media player, Web browser, communicator.

I even dared to vision that it might become the perfect canvas to help resurrect my industry in a post-paper era. It’s quite just a daydream.

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