Insights Into the Future of the Laptop

An anonymous reader writes "ThinkPad founder Arimasa Naitoh sat down for a chat with CNET.com.au about the future of the laptop. The article includes a few concept design images, as well as details on why Lenovo believes that fuel-cell technology is poor and that Origami will never succeed as a primary device." From the article: "Although Lenovo has traditionally targeted the business crowd, it recently released the consumer-targeted Lenovo 3000 series, as 'many people want to have a ThinkPad that is not black'. Naitoh shuns the use of aluminium in laptop manufacturing, calling it 'weak', instead praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties. Naitoh also showed off a number of ThinkPad concept designs with innovations such as raising displays and removable keyboards. He didn't give any word on whether these would be incorporated into official ThinkPad models, but we've snagged some pictures for you anyway."

ARM powered laptop with flash

If somebody made an ARM powered laptop with solid state storage then I'd be very happy. No moving parts, silent, incredible battery life.

Re:ARM powered laptop with flash

It was made 10 years ago, the Psion 5MX. For it's time it was very good. The included agenda/database software is even today a good match for the modern PDAs. Unfortunately these days everybody seems to be facinated with running Windows CE on a small PDA screen and call it an improvement... I'm getting old.

Re:ARM powered laptop with flash

Well,

I was recently given an old Psion Revo, and I can tell you that it's quite capable of surfing the web, since you can use Opera 5 on it. Of course it has some glitches, but for reading Slashdot and searching something on Google it's ok.

IMHO, EPOC is a much more capable OS than PalmOS or WinCE. While not rock solid, it's pretty stable and has plenty of usefull features and applications. For those who may not know, EPOC is now called Symbian... and boy, I wish Nokia offered a Symbian-enabled version of the i770!

Please can we have a decent battery life

As long as they run for a whole day (16 hours plus) when running Ubuntu or FreeBSD they will be fine.

SHOCKER!

When asked about the future prospects of Microsoft's "Origami" mini-tablet design, Naitoh was sceptical. "I'll have a hard time to convince myself that Origami will be a primary device," he said.

LENOVO LAPTOP DEVELOPER IN COMPETITOR-DISLIKING SCANDAL SHOCKER!

Re:SHOCKER!

origami is mostly software, MS is relying on partners such as lenovo to build them. MS and lenovo are not competitors per se.

Not really.

The UMPC (formerly known as Origami) is a hardware/software specification set by Microsoft for this new class of devices. The software specification contains exactly one requirement: Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005.

The hardware, on the other hand, has several requirements:

• Screen: Approximately 7" LCD, with a resolution of at least 800x480
• Weight: Approximately 1kg (2lb)
• Integrated touch screen
• Integrated 802.11b
• Integrated Bluetooth

That's it - anything with those specifications can be considered (and labeled) a UMPC.

Now here's the important question: Who would ever consider a machine with those specifications their primary device? The minimum specification doesn't include any kind of drive, speakers, or even a keyboard. As a standalone device, the UMPC is really cripped - without a drive, how do you load software?

But that's the point. Please, please repeat after me: THE UMPC IS NOT MEANT TO BE A PRIMARY OR STANDALONE PC. That is not its intended niche. It is a companion PC - a souped-up version of a PDA that runs all of the software you'd expect, and with a screen large enough to do actual work. (The tiny screen was the primary factor that limited the PDA to "address-book" status.)

It irritates me to see so many tech rags criticizing the UMPC as underpowered for primary computer use. They're just not understanding its purpose. I'm an ardent supporter of the platform (and I have no attachment to Microsoft, any UMPC manufacturer, the project, etc.) - I think it will be an excellent new device, with novel computing applications.

- David Stein

What I want...

What I want is something small that I can plug a keyboard and monitor into for desktop use but also use on the move. Not a laptop - much smaller.

The closest I've seen is this thing:

    http://www.dualcor.com/ [dualcor.com]

But it looks like it's not aimed at the general market, and has a corresponding "business class" price tag.

Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

"...praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties..."

So what did Apple get wrong then? My TiBook was looking pretty ragged after two years of use. By contrast, my 15" Aluminum G4 PowerBook doesn't have a scratch on it....

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

If you treat the surface to make it a nitride you get a very hard surface and a nice gold colour - take a look at industrial cutting tools for an example. Titanium alloys are a bit stronger than aluminium alloys but are a pain to work with and very expensive. As for strength - the same thickness of a half decent steel is stronger than a titanium alloy but of course the titanium alloy is lighter in weight.

Alumiumium alloys can also be fairly scratch resistant if they are anodised to give a thick hard oxide layer - probably what has been done with the alumiumium powerbook.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

The problem is that not all of the TiBook was actually Ti. Only the casing of the screen is actually Ti, and the whole bottom casing is just silver-colored plastic. The white frame that goes around the edge of the machine is some other kind of metal thats painted white. All these painted surfaces scratch off and look beat up, whereas the AlBook is actuallly silver.

Re:Titanium - Scratch Resisitant??

Well, it may depend on the specific alloy they use. The Ti-Powerbooks were made using CP-Ti(Commercially Pure). Frankly, that isn't a structural alloy. In fact, it has no alloying elements at all! Now the lay person would say "It's really pure, it must be really strong!". Bzzzzz....Wrong. That makes it fairly soft compared to, say Ti-6Al-4V [alleghenyludlum.com], which is kind of the standard titanium alloy that is used for most things titanium.

With the Al-books, Apple switched to an "aircraft grade" aluminum alloy. That can mean a lot of things, but generally, aircraft grade aluminum alloys are some of the strongest, lightest alloys on the market. It is also a lot easier to form aluminum. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the Al-books were forged, which would increase their strength. There is no way they could have forged the Ti-book parts, forging titanium is a very expensive process. Also, the Al-books were hard anodized, which leaves them with a thin, hard, adherent layer of Al2O3 on the surface. Al2O3 is also known as sapphire, so it adds to the scrach resistance, at least for superficial scraches, anyway.

Now, I am a Ph.D. Materials Scientist, so I would be remiss if I didn't mention that scratch resistance and strength are two entirely different things. Generally, making something scratch resistant will also make it brittle. If you had to choose between your laptop scratching or shattering, I know which one I'd choose.

That is as much insight as I can probably provide. My expertise these days is on the high temperature oxidation of Ni-based superalloys.

FWIW Lenovo does not make the laptops

Lenovo just brands them. http://tuxmobil.org/laptop_oem.html [tuxmobil.org]

Interesting stuff

Lenovo appears to be playing a smart game, looking to expand from the business market to the professional consumer. With companies like Acer and HP looking more a the entertainment machine concept Lenovo is looking to a higher value market. The Origami stuff is interesting too. The whole idea is a loser (sub laptop capability for more money) and he's wise to stay out of it. All this stress on using titanium could also be a nod towards industry fears that Lenovo might compromise quality for price. Maybe they've decided to rely on low manufacturing costs to keep prices at reasonable levels.

Some good news at least

I have to say, I'm completly on the side of "PCs are powerful enough already" - especially where Laptops are concerned. If I really wanted something that powerful, I'd just use my desktop - nothing is so important that it has to be processed on the spot, on a laptop instead of just waiting till I get home. I'm very happy that there is hope for a laptop running a full day on a single battery, in the next 1-2 years, I've been waiting for this news for a long time.

I guess it's just a waiting game now, until I find a laptop that packs 1gb of ram, something between 1.5 and 2ghz of processing power (seriously, anything more is stupid overkill), 8 hours battery life and a wide screen into something the size of my old Compaq Armada M300. That laptop is the perfect size/weight, it just sucks for battery life, and could use a lot more RAM.

Ohh well, fingers crossed.

Re:Some good news at least

My Compaq nc6000 (disclaimer, I work for hp) has

1. 1GB ram
2. 1.8GHZ single core.
3. 6+ hours battery life when I pull out the DVD drive and stick in the extension pack. Three hours otherwise.

4. The more ram you have, the worse the resume from hibernate, and there is too much corporate security junk (firewall, VPN, Symantec) to take up memory and battery life. The extra battery pack is very good for conferences, as I dont need to sit glued to power cords all day long.

   The problem with long-life laptops is most people prefer performance over battery life. And with reason -most people don't go that far without a recharge. The most definitive data gathering on this topic was actually an experiment I did in 1999, logging how different people used a laptop for six months, in a paper called "the secret life of laptops" [hp.com]

   The conclusion we came to then was that power at home and work was unimportant, compared to the wide variation in network state. Getting consistent networking mattered much more to people.

   Now that we have near-universal, WLAN, maybe being unwired matters more. I should rerun the experiment, but first I need to finish the analysis of my ongoing experiment, that of capturing the bluetooth ID of every discoverable mobile phone that goes past my house. Embrace experimental computer science!

Pivot display please

In terms of shape and size, I'm a bit surprised that peope are willing to lug around laptops with 17" displays while portrait-oriented displays are not widely available. Instead of having the whole LCD panel being the "lid" on the laptop, a smaller panel would do that and then hold the pivot to allow switching between landscape and portrait orientation.
these days I tend to keep the dock on OSX taking up the right hand side of my 16:9 screen and the only reason I don't do the same with the Windows taskbar is that some apps act funny when their menus are not where they're expected. Anyway, it makes much more sense to have the taskbars and menus taking up space on the corner of the eye than to have one web browser displaying empty space on both sides of whatever I'm reading, and then to have to scroll up and down all the time.

Re:Pivot display please

The wide aspect screens offer two key benfits. One of course is that movies are now shownin that aspect. The other turns out to be space. A short wide screen opens on an airplane much better than a taller one. The laptop requires significantly less room between you and the guy ahead leaning back so far you could do dental work on him.

Pardon me, but...

... I am having a Seinfeld moment.

Why is it that, in nearly every printed interview, people "sit down for a chat?" Does this actually happen? Does sitting down precede chats that will be put to the printed word? What happens if the interview is almost over and the two realize they were actually standing through it? Does that mean they can't use the material committed in the upright position? Should they sit down and perform the entire interview again?

One day, I am going to conduct an entire interview leaning against a well.

According to lenovo, trusted computing is future

These people are on the active promoters list [trustedcom...ggroup.org] on the official website of the trusted computing initiative.

I can tell you one thing about their future, it won't involve my dollars.

Screens in sunlight

It would be nice if laptops used displays that could be read in sunlight. I'm working at home at the moment, it's a beautiful day outside, I have a laptop and a wireless network... the only reason I'm not working outside is because I wouldn't be able to see the screen.

What I want the future to bring...

My ideal notebook:

- 8"x5" screen area (1024x800)
- high-contrast b/w indoor/outdoor screen
- 30 hour battery life
- runs on 4 AA hot swappable batteries plus internal battery
- removable solid state storage
- an open OS made for mobile work, or Linux
- full size keyboard, or BlueTooth foldable keyboard
- USB, WiFi, bluetooth, and SIM
- weight under 1lb
- thickness under 0.5"
- price around $250

titanium ... scratch-resistant properties

Kinda off topic, but... in the last couple of years I bought myself a new watch. I spent a bit more than I wanted to, but I really wanted a Breitling Aerospace. Specifically the one made from Titanium & Gold.

With a christmas bonus in my pocket, I walked into Sefridges jewellery department, tried on the watch I wanted (still wearing it) as the salesmans pitch started;

Salesman: Now this watch is made from titanium, are you aware of the properties of titanium

Me: Yes, very light and very strong, this its why its used in the aerospace industries

Salesman: Thats correct, and its also a self healing metal

Me: Excuse me?

Salesman: thats correct, if you scratch titanium, it will heal the scratch like your body will with a scar

Me:

Salesman: I know, amazing stuff

Me: sooooo, you wouldnt mind if I took a serrated knife to this breitling then

Salesman:

Me: I think someones been telling lies to you, but I am going to buy this watch anyway.

Not a great story, but some people areally are gullable.

RetroPad

I like to do old-fashioned CLI C programs, and pretty much all of my word processing is with LaTeX source code. I survived quite well and was extremely productive back in the VT220 days, and wouldn't mind having a little equivalent I could carry everywhere.

So here's what I would like, although the market is probably too small to justify. Or maybe it exists and I'm not aware of it.

The smallest, lightest device possible with (1) >=128M RAM, (2) several GB disk or maybe no disk and just a USB port for a thumbdrive, (3) >=250MHz CPU, (3) long long battery life, (4) a screen sufficient to display a bash shell, (5) runs Linux, (6) a small keyboard that is just large enough for comfortable touch-typing.

It would be somewhat like a glorified PDA, but with a somewhat larger screen that's easy to read and a built-in keyboard that's large enough to touch-type on. In a nutshell, a little VT220 with a built-in computer. Hopefully cheaper than a laptop.

This is news?

He sounds like a petulant child. Cnet just did this "article" gave him some free ad space. I mean, c'mon... He didn't say anything we haven't already thought or heard already many times over.

I don't know about you but after reading this, my opinion of Lenovo is worse now than it ever was. I don't think this guy has a clue.

MIT US$100 Laptop

Now, that's something I want!

A small, cheap, rugged, wireless, linux-enabled laptop! Something I could use for web browsing, email, IM, chat and text-editing but also capable of running a ssh shell and a freeNX session! I don't know about you, but I think that the OLPC reached a nice balance between PDA and Notebook.

Oh, and probably it's powerfull enough to run Wesnoth, NetPanzer and a SNES emulator!

On recent news ...

... I'd say the future of the laptop is hot.

Laptops need Modularity.

The main thing missing from the Laptop market is Modularity. He addresses this slightly by showing a model that has a detachable keyboard. What is really needed are inter-operable components that can be mixed and matched to fit both budget and requirements. For example, allowing users to choose screen size from several different screens, and let them all attach to the same connector on the motherboard. Allow different motherboard configurations. Allow for different sized keyboards, some with or without number pads, and some with or withough touch pads.

This is clearly the next step, but Laptop creators aren't getting the hint that desktop creators learned a long time ago. Don't put it all in one machine unless that's the low end model. Let us choose which pieces we want for our laptop and have them work together seamlessly.

Personally I want:

Full sized keyboard
15 inch screen
No touchpad
No battery
Wireless mouse
2-3 GHZ processor
3 gigs RAM
Detachable 10 gig drives

What do you want in your laptop?

Origami a primary device?

Never expected it to be, and I doubt MS did either. It's an expansion on the PDA device.

I'd expect this kind of 'stating the obvious' from a pundit, but from the head of Lenovo?

Even in the web-mercials we saw of the device, it was web-vertised as being used in conjuction *with* workstations, Media-PCs, etc...

Smashup of iBook and Thinkpad would come close.

My last two laptops were an Apple powerPC ibook and then an IBM X-31 Thinkpad. From that prospective, here is my opinion on future laptops. From the Thinkpad: 1) make it at least as tough and durable, 2) make it at least as Linux compatible, 3) please give me a nub not a pad for mouseing (sic) (or both). From the iBook: 1) keep the bottom as smooth as possible, 2)slot loading optical disks should rule in laptops 3) not black 4) cables on back and one side, opposite of optical drive 5) style is your friend, 6)sleep with a breathing LED. In general I want 6 hour battery life, at least sub 5 pound weight, work (wireless with WPA, sound, and suspend/sleep) with Ubuntu/Debian, CentOS/RedHat and Suse Linux straight from the install DVDs, , two power supplies (home and travel), and please price it at a $1000 or less.

PS What I didn't like from the Thinkpad 1) black, 2) rough slots and crap on bottom 3) no optical drive built in, from the Apple, 1) not durable (two hard drives died in first year), 2) ONE BUTTON scroll pad 3)not much choice on Linux distros and at the time, no drivers for wireless. 3)Apple fanatics.

Lenovo 3000 series

From TFA...

...it recently released the consumer-targeted Lenovo 3000 series, as "many people want to have a ThinkPad that is not black".

I'd love to own a more affordable ThinkPad that is not black. But not if it doesn't have a TrackPoint [mamboat.com]!

some thoughts of my own on laptop future...

but first, i dont think the origami is intended as a primary device.
and i liked the looks of those concepts, atleast the first one that rise up as a kind of desktop system, complete with tilted keyboard.

but what i want to comment on is that multimedia talk at the end.
what i forsee is a kind of modular system, maybe based on that rise up concept, where you have a kind of "dock" that when attached will provide the desktop with a stronger graphics card, tv tuner, and all that other stuff you need for multimedia.

maybe you can even use it for basic playback and recording even when the laptop part isnt docked via some embedded multimedia system based on wince or linux.

basicly i see the future as modular, with the laptop rather then the desktop as center.

i think one could potentialy build one right now based on amd's hypertransport buss...

Aluminium "weak"

Naitoh shuns the use of aluminium in laptop manufacturing, calling it 'weak', instead praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties.

Yeah, because what we consumers really want, is something ridiculously expensive, with a perceived feeling of exclusivity. No matter that most of the parts are plastic anyway. No matter that aluminium seems to work fine for other weight/strength-sensitive tasks, such as in the aero-industry, mountain-bikes, etc... No matter that just a little bit of coffee, rain, salt-water, other liquids, sand, ants, etc..., easily gets into the electronics and short-circuits it. No matter that harddrives are fine-tuned mechanical things that are easy to destroy just by loosing your laptop onto the concrete floor.

No, what we want is to be seduced by marketers, adding ridiculously expensive substances, such as titanium, to our laptops, just so it can be perceived as more high-tech and "exclusive". This has nothing to do with aluminium being "weak", with todays designs laptops won't be any stronger using titanium, than they will be faster if you boost the (electrical) power.

Ideal Laptop Feature:

I've heard this feature and that feature touted and to be perfectly honest they've all got their merits but my question is when will my laptop start doing some of my work for me? I'd like to see that as a feature of the future!

Re:I love my Lenovo N100 07683VU

Wow -1 somebody's got the Mondays.

Re:Where to buy a decent thinkpad?

"m" and "t" models are different. "m" is bigger and heavier, while "t" is smaller and more portable.