An ARM executive warned about the coming stampede in a press event in
Taipei this week, saying as many as 50 media tablet designs will hit
the market this year, including ones from each of the top ten telecom
service providers.

Giants are running with this herd. In the wake of the Apple iPad
announcement, Hewlett-Packard is ratcheting up the volume on its Slate
product. Dell and Sony are also leaking news about their plans.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, we saw a similar flood of
e-books debut. Others are experimenting with more loosely defined
concepts for smartbooks and mobile Internet devices.

Meanwhile, netbooks — miniature notebook PCs — have hit the mainstream. And
smartphones have become the center of mass of the mobile maelstrom,
said analysts and other attendees at the Mobile World Congress, the big
annual cellular event.

The problem is many OEMs will get trampled in this surge of
similar tablets, e-books, netbooks and smartphones. Indeed, Apple
recently fired a legal warning shot to scare off an industry that has
been busy cloning the look and feel of its iPhone--and has started
imitating its iPad even before it hits the streets.

The relatively slow legal system is not likely to stop
imitators. Apple's patent infringement suits on the iPhone
look-and-feel are likely to have as little market impact as its
Macintosh look-and-feel suits against Microsoft did twenty years ago.

Competitors are more likely to be tripped up by watching Apple too
closely and failing to see some other key hurdles on the way to
success — like a compelling user experience and a broad ecosystem.

New mobile systems need to be designed to serve a genuine user
need, and serve it well. That's a hard discipline at a time when it's
so easy to build or source an iThing knock-off for a set of service
providers hungry to sell more gadgets they can get subscribers to
attach to their networks.

The overarching problem for many mobile devices is they are
either too big to fit easily in a pocket (even the iPhone falls into
this category for the blue jeans crowd) or they are too small to do
real work. There is a list as long as my arm of startups with display
and input technologies that could address those issues. In a cover
story, my colleague R. Colin Johnson just called out a dozen of them in
the e-book sector alone.

The simplest way to think different than Apple is to think
open. As veteran mobile analyst Gerry Purdy of MobileTrax points out
Apple has yet to support flash cards, multi-tasking and Adobe Flash in
its mobile systems.

Google with its Android environment is already exploiting those rather
large holes. The search giant's growing store of applications also
helps OEMs tap into an instant ecosystem. For its part, HP is showing
how it can think different and open by trumpeting support of Adobe
Flash in its upcoming tablet.

A few years from now we will look back on the period from 2007
to 2012 as a time of great experimentation in mobile system design.
Many ideas will wind up under the hooves of an industry racing ahead,
but a few will ride to heights we haven't even seen yet.