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.
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