Kaon Mobile could almost be Intel MID
CrunchGear came across the Kaon Mobile, a small slider unit featuring a 4.8-inch WQVGA tilting display and 55-key metal keyboard, while prowling the halls of CES last week. The gang wasn’t given full details, but the official product site, which refers to the device as the KAON MOBILERES, fills in most of the gaps by providing system specs, functionality, and images showing the gadget with a different keyboard.
If the Kaon Mobile weren’t running Windows CE 5.0 Professional and didn’t have to rely on an SDIO/wi-fi card for web browsing, it would be easy to mistake it for one of those Mobile Internet Devices from Intel. For one thing, it’s packing a 30GB/60GB hard drive, SD card slot, USB 2.0 host and device ports, and mobile DVR functions.
Its 3300mAh lithium polymer battery should provide enough power for up to 4.5 hours of video playback time and about 7 hours for everything else (music, image, text).
At its core, the Kaon Mobile is actually more of a portable media player than anything else. It has both audio and video recording capabilities and supports a slew of multimedia codecs (DivX, WMV, H.264, MP3, OGG, and AC3 included).
In addition to what I assume is Internet Explorer Mobile, the Kaon Mobile comes preinstalled with a VoIP program, RSS feed reader, email client, and "Windows application." It also has a customizable widget menu and several flavors of mobile TV (DVB-T, ISDB-T, T-DMB, DMB-TH).
As is evident from the DVB mention, the Kaon Mobile isn’t quite ready for the U.S. It could easily shed or otherwise disable its antenna to reach American shores, but for now, it’s slated for release in Korea in about a month.
