Component development projects under way portend fairly substantial changes in notebook design, according to executives and analysts. Fuel cells and battery enhancements, which will let notebooks run three to 10 times longer without a recharge, will begin to appear by late 2004.
Smaller hard drives and screens will also likely lead to some changes in the classic notepad shape for some models. Multiband wireless communications, in which notebooks drift from cellular to Wi-Fi to back, will be common.
"The ThinkPad will evolve," said Brian Connors, chief technology officer and vice president of business development in IBM's PC division.
Nonetheless, designers will continually have to ask, "Is it just cool, or is it functional?".
The pending design changes for notebooks are being driven by one of the most influential forces in the technology industry: People are buying the portable computers.
Unlike desktop PCs, though, notebooks have to more acutely adapt to contradictory demands in the marketplace. Customers want large screens, fast processors and beefy hard drives--three components that can require substantial amounts of electricity.
At the same time, they want long battery life, a notebook that measures less than 3cm thick and a carrying weight less than 2kg--features that aren't easy to achieve in a high-voltage lap warmer.
This leaves engineers two choices. "Either you can supply more power into the platform or take more power out of it," said Mike Rocke, the strategic investment manager for the mobile products group inside Intel Capital, the chipmaking giant's venture capital arm. Intel has invested in approximately 15 mobile-centric companies, a spokeswoman said.
PolyFuel, for instance, a spinoff of SRI International, is working on fuel cells for portable devices. The cells essentially break down methanol molecules into protons, electrons and carbon dioxide. While the protons pass through a specialized membrane, the electrons can't and get shuffled into a wire powering a cell phone or laptop. The byproducts from the chemical reaction come together as water molecules.
"You are building a miniature power production facility. You are producing electricity out of chemicals," Rocke said. It's also safer than a close chemical relative, he said. "You can get power out of these things below the flammability point of methanol."
The replaceable fuel cartridges initially will last two to three times longer than batteries but eventually last 10 times longer. Notebooks containing fuel cells will begin to arrive in late 2004 to 2005, he said. Another fuel cell company, MTI MicroFuel Cells, gives the same projection.
Rather than replace batteries, other companies are looking to supplement them with supercapacitors, a concept for storing electricity at the chip level first aired in Japanese academic journals in the late 1980s.
"Supercapacitors hold more electricity than capacitors and transfer and recharge faster than batteries," Anthony Kongats, CEO of Cap-XX, a Sydney, Australia, supercapacitor start-up, said in an e-mail. "It is not uncommon to see improvements of 200 percent plus for low temperature operations and 50 percent in handhelds" at minimum voltage levels.
Batteries can be completely removed, but the notebook will continue to run for five minutes, said Rocke, adding that supercapacitor-enhanced notebooks could begin to arrive in 2004. Intel invested in both PolyFuel and Cap-XX.
Other start-ups are working on efficient solar cells, low-power screens, and new types of heat-dissipation techniques. Many of these companies are spinoffs from government and military projects. MTI, for example, received a US$4.7 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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