By Woody Hobbes

Welcome to ReinventMobile.com. I hope you’ll find the content and interactive experience to be cool, relevant and informative. But, most of all, I hope you will become an active member of our co-innovation community.

ReinventMobile is all about rethinking the next-generation of mobile PCs, from your perspective. Whether you are a road warrior, gamer, casual user, student, electronics engineer, industrial designer or IT professional, we want to engage you, as an end user, in designing the future of mobility.

Today’s portable PC plays a defining role in our shared, on-the-go experience. It is a business and personal productivity tool, an essential communications and networking platform, an entertainment system, online shopping vehicle, and much more. But it is not everything that users want it to be. In a quick online poll of end-users, we found that many, in fact half, of those surveyed reported they either loved or were satisfied with their mobile PC experience. On the other hand, three-quarters indicated there was real room for improvement.

The goal of ReinventMobile is to learn from you how the mobile PC can best be improved to meet your needs. We will ask you to react to new mobility concepts and prototypes, provide feedback through surveys and pop polls, and share your ideas, inspirations and concerns through user-generated commentary. Keep coming back, because there will be a variety of community building features added in the weeks and months ahead, and we will constantly bring you new content and insight from inside and outside of the PC industry ecosystem.

What I want from my next PC

I have a lot of complaints about my PC. None of my complaints have been addressed to my satisfaction by Vista. I like the way my PDA, MP3 Player, phone and in-car navigation system work. I can turn them on and off in a few seconds. They are usually powered on and ready for me to use. If the screen isn’t showing the function I want to use, one or two keystrokes or a thumbwheel or 5-way navigation button will take me where I want to be in a second or two. When I’m working on my email or my calendar, looking at a map or making a call, I’m not pestered or distracted by other things going on with my device.

Predictable, reliable: To some it may be annoying that these gadgets don’t have multiple screens visible at the same time like a PC, but there are many times when it’s a pleasure to focus — particularly when I’m on the move and don’t have time for complexity. Another nice thing about these modern electronic tools is that they do what they do reliably and predictably. No blue screens, no mysterious slowdowns and no need to boot the system because something isn’t working right or fast enough. I can’t remember the last time my phone or PDA couldn’t connect to the network but this is a regular occurrence with my PC. True, I need to move from cabled LAN to WiFi to WAN connectivity on a daily basis but should that really require an extra five minutes and sometimes a boot?

Appliance: Ok, before you send me your list of complaints about your PC or stuff you like about your electronic device but hate about your PC let me give you a glimpse of the future. I like to think about the next step for PC’s as one where we embed an “appliance” like your PDA in the PC so that it can operate reliably, independently, securely and with ease. The electronics industry uses the word appliance in a number of ways but the way I use here is: fixed limited function and it does exactly what it was designed to do at shipment - no more and no less. The appliances user interface and functionality is the same day-in and day-out without the need to be upgraded or repaired daily. These “appliances” will work very much on the PC like they do on their native devices. The screen and keyboards on the PC are larger so the appliance will have this advantage but specialized input mechanisms like thumbwheels may be missing.

Easy: One of the major advantages of an appliance is its ease of use. The drawback is that it is intended for a limited purpose and it only performs that function. Windows on a PC provides a wide range of functionality which can be updated or enhanced at anytime. This benefit brings with it complexity, lot’s of notification screens and the ability for hackers to update your PC with their own “special” changes.

Power: One of the advantages of smaller devices is they use less power and therefore their battery life is longer. It is likely that when the PC is running the reduced function appliance it may too have a longer battery life. The appliance could save a lot on battery life if it only used a part of the screen, used less memory, fewer cpu cycles or could leave the disk powered off for long periods of time. These compromises could be advantageous to the traveler or someone in a long meeting who would rather have the elongated battery life than the full screen.

Appliance functions: What are the functions that could be placed in an appliance? We have dreamed up a number of them but almost anything is possible. The primary functionality that I believe would work best as an appliance are: messaging, web browsing, malware scanning, web checkout, media player, connection management, and the ability to service your machine and Windows remotely.

Virtualization: How do we run these additional appliance functions without disturbing Windows? New solutions like vPro from Intel and Trinity from AMD make it possible to virtualize the computer so that processes can run inexpensively and reliability outside of Windows to enhance, manage and secure the computer.

I hope this blog entry gives you a glimpse of how the new world of the PC might work. I don’t know about you but I can’t wait for this next generation of machines to be designed and delivered. Put me down for serial number 1.