Thirty-six years ago, Alan Kay, a computer scientist, published a rough sketch of his Dynabook portable computer, establishing the ideal of ever more intimate personal computers.
During the next decade, Kay's tablet design, at 9 inches by 12 inches by 3/4-inch, or 23 centimeters by 31 centimeters by 2 centimeters, evolved into its now-ubiquitous form-factor -- the term used by electronics specialists to describe the size of a particular gadget.
Since then, there has been a proliferation 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 handheld device that began as the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant designed by the Palm Computing co-founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. An endless array of popular products, from BlackBerrys to iPhones, are descended from the Palm.
This portable world is now neatly broken into gadgets that fit comfortably in your pocket and devices that snuggle equally comfortably on your lap.
Is there room for a third category? Perhaps a new class of consumer gadgets that fits somewhere between handheld and laptop? For want of a better description, I propose that we label this form-factor the iMoleskine, after the Hemingway-esque notebooks favored by writers.
To date, the best example of the proto-iMoleskine future is the Amazon Kindle book reader, which is the size of a trade paperback book. A quirky first-generation effort, the device has been criticized as having an odd user interface design and a flickering display. Because of the company's endless front-page promotional efforts on its Web store, however, the Kindle seems headed for nichedom.
Intel certainly wants us to believe there is more room in the middle.
Last month, at a splashy forum in China for developers, the company initiated its effort to create a category for mobile Internet devices, or MID's,...

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