The Ashes

Over at the IDF Beijing yesterday, Intel showed up with a spectacular new MID that’s codenamed “Mars” and runs a top-notch Atom processor. The gadget, rolled out with fanfare from a relatively unknown company called BYD, looks like a clamshell phone, but it’s actually a sophisticated portable Internet device. This thing really does run a full-blown Windows XP install. Plus, if you get down on one knee and really take a good, long look at the thing, you’ll see that there’s a real QWERTY keyboard tucked into the package, a genuine secondary screen, and also a regular phone keypad.

A hunk of polymers like this one isn’t just about the looks; most likely, you’ll want to imagine yourself trekking over all sorts of mind-boggling terrain, getting yourself into the kinds of scrapes and situations that only people with a seriously rocket-powered handheld computer can fathom. While we don’t have a solid timeline yet for the BYD Mars MID, but likely we’ll start hearing about it more and more as the clock ticks towards the global information singularity. As for pricing, your guess is as good as ours at this point. For now, keep buying lottery scratch-off tickets and three-dollar energy drinks.