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Cellphone PC's the new batch

There has been many attempts to make PC's as small as possible or to equip cell phones with as many PC features as possible.

The realization that as wireless broadband gets more prolific and todays workforce is more mobile than ever before the need to have small, capable PC's is very real.

Palm aired their approach, the Foleo at D: last week. Touted as a Cell Phone Companion it has many of the features required by a PC and uses the phone to create the connection.

Now Taiwan is pushing it's pledge for the space. For a long time Taiwan cell phone manufacturers have understood the need for cell phones to have a full keyboard, Dopod and HTC both have handsets with slide out keyboards. Now they are looking at full PC features in small units.

Via Technologies are launching the Nanobook. A small but powerful PC that at less than 1 Kilogram is looking for convenient portability.

Asus are launching the PC 701 or Eee. At 2 pounds, WiFi and solid state storage this mini PC should be well priced. Price has always been the problem for uptake in the past with most of the devices that have tried to drive this space.

Of course if you believe the adverts from Nokia then the new form that the PC has already taken is the N95. Nokia is trying to shape the Mobile Internet Device (MID) space with eraly entries of the 770 internet tablet and it's new brother the N800. I think I will wait a bit longer and see how the technology evolves to see where the feature alignment heads, more towards voice and PC convergence or compromising some features for size. For me the latter would be best as there is already a lot of confusion with many of the current smart phones that promise the world but compromise on the quality of the core function, voice.

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