iDuple announces mobile cloud computing device

iDuple, an Indian company has announced its intention to build a Mobile Cloud Computing Device on their blog. The Mumbai based startup already offers a paid service for they call ‘Webtops’ – a very windows looking system that runs in your browser. So the concept behind the Mobile Cloud Computing is simple – extend the webtop technology to a hand held device.

On paper, the idea seems pretty interesting even though the finer details are not available at this time. The device has the form factor of a tablet and boasts of a 5 second boot time. There is no software, other than the browser. No hard disk either. All processing and storage will be done on powerful servers and rendered on the device. It is expected to have WiFi and 3G variants.

Users will be offered upto 50GB of storage on the cloud, I’m guessing premium services for additional storage will be a source of revenue as well. Obviously, with a large volumes of data on the cloud, security becomes an issue. The company has assured prospective users on its blog that privacy of data will be taken care of. It goes on to say that it will also offer private cloud services for businesses. They will also have the option of connecting to multiple webtops and even configure the device to work with their own cloud platforms.

The demo of these Webtops can be found at their homepage. I played around with it for a while. It had a very Windows-esque feel to it Start Menu et al, aside from the iOS like multiple home screen feature. There were a couple of useful applications on it as well. Since it was a demo, the amount I could tinker with them was limited.

A lot of specifics about the device such as price, size etc have not mentioned at this stage.

‘It all started as a dream, inspired by the desire to touch human lives. A dream motivated by the promise of an affordable technology, perfected by dozens of discussions and debates with friends and industry veterans and evolved over tens of thousands of man-hours of design and engineering.’ This is how they begin their post announcing the device. Let’s hope this dream translates into a reality.

Once that happens, competing or even carving a niche for themselves in the crowded tablet space with several industry bigwigs will be a different ball game altogether.