Intel Edison

Intel Edison 560

I’m sure we all know that information technology is becoming smaller and smaller, we went from computers that took up whole rooms with kilobytes of storage space to computers the size of a wallet that have hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, that’s one hundred million times more space.

Listen to this, Intel announced about 2 years ago that they plan on producing a computer the size of an SD card. You know, those super thin, no bigger than a square inch, cards we stick in our digital cameras. Yeah, those.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas back in 2014 The Intel Corporations CEO Brian Krzanich outlined a range of products, initiatives and strategic relationships aimed at accelerating innovation across a range of mobile and wearable devices as well as individual inventors’ own connected creations. At the keynote Krzanich painted how the world is entering an era of integrated computing defined not by the device, but by the integration of technology into people’s lifestyles in ways that offer individuals new utility and value.

The idea behind this SD card sized PC is to be integrated into wearable computing. Krzanich announced Edison; “a full Pentium-class PC” that’s the size and shape of the SD card you might otherwise put in your camera. It’s powered by a dual-core Quark SOC, runs Linux, and has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, according to the company. Intel even has a specific app store designed for Edison. To demonstrate the potential for Edison, Intel showed a concept for a “Nursery 2.0.” In the concept, a baby was wearing a Mimo onesie outfitted with sensors tracking things like temperature, and Edison was used to display that information on, of all things, a coffee mug. When the baby was comfortable, blinking lights on the mug show a happy green smiling face, but when something is wrong that face turns red.

It was later announced that this mini PC won’t be able to fit into a package that size given a few hardware changes. But instead this PC will be slightly thicker than an SD, still rather impressive though. Although this PC is interesting and definitely has its potential, I don’t think I’d be picking one up any time soon after launch. Given the size it would most likely have proprietary connector and that’s not something I really have the time or money to invest in.