No shill o' the month will make me buy a laptop right now

SOME YEAR I'm going to buy a replacement for my laptop, but there's no real incentive for me to run out and get a new one tomorrow. Average pricing and weight of units continues to drop with the only drawback being power consumption. Further, there's no "Great leap" out there like we had back in the days of the x86 to Pentium races.

Depending on the shill-of-the-month, there are a lot of new goodies in the R&D pipelines that would make today's laptop much better. Methanol fuel cells seem to be at the top of the list of near-term goodies, but they won't be out in quantity until the end of '04 and it should be interesting to see if there will be plug-and-play units to replace existing batteries. Hopefully airline safety won't freak out about methanol fuel cartridges that are likely twice as flammable as the miniatures on the drink cart. I don't know if this will be the death knell for batteries, but I suspect enviros will make a case that a methanol fuel cell is "greener" than a Lithium or NiCad.

Hopefully, I'll also get some watts and bucks back with a move to OLED technology over stock LCD displays. OLED should also provide a lighter, thinner laptop with less enviro problems upon disposal - plus just look better than a CRT or LCD. There is at least one Japanese 20" OLED display prototype floating around, done by Chi Mei Optoelectronics with IBM Research pitching in technical can-do.

MRAM, supposedly available for sampling by the end of the year for cell phone and PDA apps, should also make for zero-delay bootup and power-down, plus provider greater storage density than either RAM or Flash memory. Wags are taking a speed up of six times over conventional RAM. Speed, non-volatile, and the same price as dynamic RAM. What's not to like? There seems to be some hedging on if MRAM will actually save energy since it doesn't require constant refresh. Both Motorola and IBM are racing to get MRAM in wide use by 2005.

Wireless? Well, sod 802.11g. IEEE announced the quest for 802.11n last week, pushing data rates from around 33Mbps or so to 100 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz range. But this new standard will have to compete with air space with Bluetooth, 802.11b, .11g, cell phones, microwave spill-over, and WiMedia. Mr. WiMedia is supposed to be the first generation of intelligent dongles that connect stereo and video devices together, so you can stream video off of your PC to your TV. How well it will work in 2.4 GHz with all the other crap in the spectrum will be interesting. Around $100 list per dongle, WiMedia devices are supposed to be smart enough to find open spectrum to move quality streaming video at 55 Mbps for short distances around a typical home (i.e. if you have a castle, there could be issues). Since the 802.11n effort has just been announced, it'll likely be at least a year or two - and another standards fight - before it shows up in hardware.

Plan "B" for both WiMedia and Bluetooth is a UWB (ultrawideband) solution under some IEEE number I can't remember, but promises speeds of 480 Mbps for short distances, along with much lower power consumption than either. Specs for UWB were supposed to be finalized out by IEEE in Singapore a couple of weeks ago, but that hasn't stopped Samsung from testing chip sets in the states against a July draft standard. Again, less power, more speed.

Hard drives will also be repackaged into a density/power configuration better than today's models. How much better by mid-'05? Maybe a "fat" laptop will have 200-250GB and a "thin and light" one will be at a simple 80-120 GB.

About the only open question for my future laptop is what sort of chip it'll have in it. It would be nice if Transmeta actually delivered the goods with Astro/Efficeon-whatever, but I suspect it'll be an old-fashioned low-power Pentium rather than an Althon-64. Do the words "64-bit" and "low-power" fit into the same design scheme? If they do, it's likely all the (obvious) bugs will be worked out of Win-XP-64 by the end of 2005. µ