Intel showed the slot-in cards (right), supporting both Wimax and Wifi. designed for the Menlow mobile platform, due for release later this year.

Conspicuous by its absence was Apple and its iPhone, though there were plenty of companies with products and services targeted at the device and signs that other companies were taking a more adventurous line with touch screens. Pictured above left and below are some of the movements HTC offers on its touch-driven phone.

Ultra-mobiles and mobile-internet devices (Mids) were the dog that didn't bark. The mobile-phone world seems more or less oblivious to these emerging new formats, safe in its belief that people will always want a small pocketable handset. That is as may be, but the market for these devices will certainly overlap with that of the smartphone and could eventually take it over.

Even Microsoft, whose work on origami and ultra-mobiles is at least as revolutionary as the iPhone, kept largely quiet on the subject. Instead, it boasted that Sony Ericsson has introduced a Windows Mobile phone, as if that somehow made its products sexier rather than being a  route for the handset maker to get into the corporate world .

There were a couple of ultra-mobiles on the Microsoft stand that I had not seen before – both with keyboards. One was the Fujitsu Lifebook U(left), which weighs 580g (I'd guess without the battery) and measures 17.1 x 13.3 x 3.2 cm, with a 5.6in display that twists to cover the keyboard and double as a touch screen. Personally I think a screen needs to be a little larger for handwriting input.

I preferred the second design, the HTC Shift (right), though I didn't like the look of it at first because the keyboard slides out from the bottom, a format that in the past has led to unsatisfactory designs. But the Shift's display moves back along two channels and then twists up to become a very usable little notebook. It has a 7in screen that can be used in tablet mode (left) and will be on sale in the UK next week for £835 inc VAT.

Intel showed a quartet of MIDs but until we see what these devices will do it is hard to judge their potential impact. As I reported, ARM-based platforms are well up to competing in this space. Indeed they already do, in the form of the iPhone and Nokia's N8xx tablets.

The interest here is that these designs could let Far Eastern chipmakers into the mainstream processor market as they can design their own systems-on-a-chip around ARM cores which have a large developer community and toolset.

None of the devices around at the moment use the latest Arm11 MP which can have up to four cores. Ian Drew, vice president of ARM's solution and segment marketing, says the design would allow devices to power down to one core if that is all they need, while allowing them to called in extra cores when necessary.

Drew  could not say how ARMs compare with Menlow in terms of power drain because it depends on how the designs are implemented by licensees.

Menlow is supposed to use a tenth the power of 2006 notebook processors while delivering the same performance. Drew said: "Intel talks about how much the processor draws but it does not say anything about the chipset. That draws power too."

Open-source initiatives, including Android, were another hot topic at MWC. I'll write about those later in the week.