Jenn from Pocketables.net shows us an N800-looking MID out of China that has an interesting portable dock. The dock says “MID Expansion inch on it, and seems to be just that. It snuggly fits to the bottom of the device and has a screen cover attached to it than can fold over the screen of the MID to protect it.
The dock has it’s own a battery which means that attaching it to the MID does more than just add an additional headphone jack, ethernet, USB, and VGA out port, but it also functions as an extended battery. It appears as though there is no connector on the bottom of the MID and from the images we can see only a USB cord attaching the dock to the MID. It seems as though the MID can be charged through USB if this is indeed the case. In the images it appears as though both the dock and the MID have SIM card slots which probably means you can use dual SIMs, as the unit is also a phone.
The MID itself is fairly low powered with a 624MHz CPU, 128MB of RAM, and a 4GB SSD. The unit is running what appears to be a Linux distro which has plenty of stolen graphic designs from the iPhone, and it seems like there is a hint of Maemo in there too (the OS that runs on the Nokia Internet Tablets).
As Jenn noted, this solution definitely looks better than having a port replicator dongle sticking out of your handheld device, and the fact that is doubles as a battery and (triples?) as a case for the MID is pretty cool. It is also great that when you attach the dock it still allows you to use the MID in a mobile manner; most docks are designed to stay in one place simply by the nature of the idea of a dock. So what do we call it, a mobile dock? Sounds paradoxical if you ask me.
[tech.163.com] via [Pocketables.net]
Low profile MID features interesting case/dock concept http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=6354
I like the concept, though it isn’t too pretty. If it is challenging the Nokia N800 then it has a higher spec.
Stick Snapdragon inside at 1GHz. and you have a decent bit of kit.