Here are nice high resolution videos of the Aigo and the Lenovo MIDs. After a while there is not much to see due to the software still being in early stages of development. Even so, the Lenovo looks the more polished of the two.

http://softwareblogs.intel.com/2008/...ernet-devices/

I could never understand the form factor of the Lenovo, why position an array of mobile phone style input keys on a relatively large panel on the right hand side? I now see why, Lenovo will use T9 text input technology.

I was unaware of this technology until recently when a friend showed it to me on his phone – my own mobile is too old to accommodate it so I have no direct experience. It looks very interesting and you can see a demonstration of it in action
http://www.t9.com/

It seems that we need to find a better way of inputting text on a handheld. Simply mimicking a full size layout on a MID, either by software on the screen or by a physical slide out keyboard may not necessarily be the best approach.

So suddenly the Lenovo becomes very interesting indeed and I look forward to hands-on reviews of this radical approach to text input which was, after all, conceived to meet the need for fast accurate input on small devices.

Handhelds aside, the fact that we still cling to archaic and deliberately inefficient QWERTY keyboards after all this time is a bit of a nonsense.