The Future of Notebook Computing

By Roland Piquepaille

Howard Locker is not your ordinary forecaster. He is Senior Architect at IBM Personal Computing Division. I guess his vision of the future is backed by solid arguments. What will bring us the next five years besides faster processors?

  • Design: A significant change in the look and feel of notebooks will come with the adoption of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, made of light-emitting organic material that glows when an electrical charge is passed through it.
  • Organic Storage: Within five years, we will see significant advancements in organic storage. Millipede, being developed at IBM Research, uses thousands of nano-sharp tips to punch indentations representing individual bits into a thin plastic film, creating a powerful disk that is also re-writeable. Millipede has already demonstrated a data storage density of a trillion bits per square inch -- 20 times higher than the densest magnetic storage available today.
  • Energy Efficiency: One battery life-extending technology on the horizon is fuel cell. Unlike current notebook batteries that can plug in anywhere to recharge, fuel cell technology requires users to go to a cell refueling station to recharge their cells.

These technologies may or may not be successful. However, the next big thing is not one of them, according to the author.

The next big thing, then, is not some far-out technology or funky device we've never seen, but simply the conversion of data. Five years from now, we won't be using one device that functions as a PC, a PDA and a cell phone, but we will be using technology consistent across all three devices. The calendar program you use will be accessible through your PC, your PDA and your cell phone, but will not reside in any one device. Data will become transparent to devices.

Source: Howard Locker, for ExtremeTech, February 17, 2003


Famous quotes containing the words future and/or notebook:

    “It has no future but itself—
    Its infinite contain
    Its past—enlightened to perceive
    New periods of pain.”
    —Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

    “When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)