Rethinking the laptop - again

IF LIFE IS GOOD and if manufacturers are smart, the only moving parts in my next laptop will be the power button, the volume buttons, and the fan. With a little good design, maybe you don't even need a fan.

What I'd like to have is a portable device that has the capabilities of a PDA - low power, simple applications - with a 14 to 15.4 inch screen and a “normal” keyboard, plus a battery for 5-6 hours of normal use. Since I'm dreaming, I'd like to have a regular sized cord for recharging rather than a downsized power “brick.”

I've tried the folding keyboard/PDA combination and found it wanting. I can't get excited over the ultra-mobile PC concepts because I'm not a thumb-typist and because I prefer to read web pages rather than squint at them. Has anyone used one for something other than a cool prop in “24”?

Creative types would do well to see what they can steal, er, borrow from OLPC's mongrel mono/color display to switch between a pretty-color-indoors mode to a readable-mono-sunlight mode. I can't believe someone else can't figure out how to do this without getting into an extended patent/license battle.

Keep the weight under three pounds for a baseline configuration, under 4 pounds fully tricked out. Best way to do that is to ditch anything with a spindle - hard drive, DVD/CD writer.

For I/O, the perfect solution would be an SD slot, a CardBus slot, two USB ports, wireless USB, and a SVGA port. I'll probably regret it, but no parallel port. Maybe I'll carry around a wireless USB dongle/adapter instead when/if I need to connect to a parallel printer. Network connectivity would be 10/100 or GigE, with wireless connectivity provided by 802.11n, assuming it ever gets approved. An ExpressCard slot for a wireless broadband modem of some type, be it WiMAX or cellular or (more likely) a hybrid card that does both.

The boot drive will be either a 16 or 32 GB “solid state” (i.e. flash) drive. A secondary 1.8 inch hard disk drive of 100 to 120 GB would be a snap-in option - if you can't leave home without your James Bond DVD collection, for example. Might as well stick in SATA and eSATA for both boot and secondary drives, as well as for quick backups of both. You'd have enough firmware/middleware stuck into it to power off/power down the secondary drive.

So what drives all this? It depends if you want/need a true Windows platform or you just want a writing/e-mail/PowerPoint platform.

If you have to have Windows Vista, then it's going to likely be 2 GB of RAM (and the energy cost) and an Intel Silverthorne 45-nm chip, coming in 2008.

If you don't need Vista and its overhead, then you can either drop in a tailored Linux distro or run Windows CE on an Intel XScale chip. But if you're opening up the device to a Linux distribution, then you've just opened up the floor to other processors, such as Analog Device's Blackfin. Intel has made noises that Linux is a better solution than Windows for mini-tablets/Ultra-mobile PCs - assuming that anyone decides to buy them. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out.

Price tag? I'd like to see it on my Big Buy shelf under $1000 in 2008, preferably under $750. The flash drive is going to be the most expensive piece for the baseline configuration, with a dual-mode screen likely being the second biggest. µ