What sort of notebook could you be buying in 4 months, or in 2004? We peek into the crystal ball.

Notebook makers are hitting a brick wall.

In notebooks such as the Toshiba Portege 2000 and Sharp PC-UM20, they've made them as thin and light as possible while maintaining a reasonable screen size and battery life. In beefy desktop replacements such as the Toshiba Satellite 1950-A740, they've been stuffed chock-full of multimedia goodies, but at the cost of portability. The same with mobile workstations such as the Dell Precision M50. These have processors and graphics chipsets than outpace many desktop PCs, but are hobbled by size and weight.

In "desknotes" such as the DeskNote A929 they've been made as cheap as possible, but at the cost of battery-based mobility. And in subnotes such as the Fujitsu P-series, they've been shrunk down for ultimate portability, but screen and keyboard ergonomics have suffered.

Manufacturers are looking for a way out of the cage and are waiting for the next generation of processor, battery and display technologies to be ready for prime time. Research teams, from large firms such as IBM, Kodak, and small ones like Cambridge Display Technology, are beavering to break the notebook deadlock.

Displays That Batteries Love
Current notebook screens are liquid crystal displays (LCDs) These consist of one or more light- emitting tubes that shine white light though a grid. The grid is made up of picture cells, or pixels, which are themselves made up of a red, blue or green sub-pixel. An XGA or 1024x768 pixel notebook display is made up of 1024 columns, each column consisting of 768 pixels. It's rare to find a notebook that can run on more than 3 hours on a battery because LCDs suck up so much juice. The cure: Various research groups are working on technologies that combine portability, low power consumption and good displayed image. These include:

Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDS): Manufacturers are interested in OLED because it could replace liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) for notebooks. OLED technology uses a light- emitting organic material that glows when an electrical charge is passed through it--no need for backlighting. But OLED technology is still in its early stages, and much of the infrastructure still needs to be set up, including large scale manufacturing plants.

Today, the only OLEDs displays on sale are found in small devices that display fixed, scrolling patterns such as text. These can be found in in-car read-outs and other mobile devices.

There are two types of OLEDs on the market. Eastman Kodak has been developing and manufacturing displays based on small molecule OLED. The other type, polymer-based OLED, has the potential to ease the manufacturing process because the polymers can be sprayed or printed onto a substrate, or base. However, small molecule-based OLED technology has a two- year head start on polymer. Small mobile devices such as phones are using molecule OLEDs.

For absolute portability, why use a panel display at all? A group of researchers are working on a way to beam images directly into the eye with a laser. The moving beam traces a pattern in the retina, the light-sensing back surface inside the eye, much in the same an electron gun paints an image on a standards cathode tube display. A small device worn over one or both eyes could act as displays for a computer.

Power plays

The technology itself is not new, with inventors suggesting its possibility in the 19th century. But lately, the rise of volt-guzzling mobile devices and the quest for greener cars have revived interest these generators.

Each fuel cell is filled with a liquid that is a source of the stuff of electricity, electrons. Using metals that act as catalysts, electrons are separated from the fuel molecules and are diverted along conductors. The fuel can be hydrogen, ethanol or alcohol. Hydrogen is used today in testbed cars because these cells release only clean emissions--pure water is one product of the chemical reaction--and because cars are big enough to be made safe for the transport and "burning" of potentially explosive hydrogen.

For smaller devices such as cell phones, PDAs and notebooks, less volatile methanol and ethanol is being looked into.

Power-sipping processors: Transmeta got there first with their Crusoe processor two years ago but failed to set the world alight, thanks to over-exuberant prelaunch hype and raw performance that induces more yawns than wows. Still, it has found some success, with notebook makers such as Fujitsu and Sony incorporating the chip in their subnotes.

Intel launched mobile versions of their desktop processors last year, starting with the mobile Pentium III, or Pentium III-M. The Pentium 4-M came along this year. Chipmaking rival AMD has also answered with its mobile Athlon processor. Mobile processors generally behave the same as desktop processors, except for the ability step down their power consumption when the notebook is in battery mode.

However, the chip giant is not content with that and next year will see the launch of a new mobile chip architecture, in a processor codenamed Banias. At its release, Intel sources have said that the chip will do the same work of a desktop processor but consume about a quarter less energy--not an earthshaking achievement, but improvements will come with model revisions.

Net Everywhere and Other Enhancements
Now that 802.11-based wireless networking is firmly entrenched in both the home and business environments, more notebook makers will integrate 802.11b and 802.11a chips into the machine, in much the same way that Ethernet ports became standard equipment. As demand grows, the price of the chipsets should fall low enough for makers in incorporate the chips without incurring a big price penalty.

Bluetooth, the other networking standard which is used for short-range communications, looks increasingly less likely to matter as Wi-Fi (802.11b) gains in applications and popularity.

Desknotes--low-priced notebooks featuring desktop processors and no batteries--will become ever more popular, and it's possible that large US and Japanese makers will want to step into a market dominated by the Taiwanese.

As the USB 2.0 tide grows in the desktop world, this high-speed interface will surely become standard ware in the mobile arena in a few months, with mainboard chipset makers such as VIA and Intel taking the next logical step. Also coming in the short term: A faster graphics bus in the form the AGP 8X.

And also coming up by the end of this year: A DVD recorder in a notebook. Pioneer is developing this product and the drive will read and re-write DVD discs at 2X speed, record CDs at 16X speed and rewrite CDs at 10X speed.