A. The reason for the gap can be summed up this way: Last year consumers bought 700 million cell phones but only 50 million laptops. On top of that, phones and some PDAs generate big wireless connection fees. Because the potential profits from them far outstrip those from laptops, they get more attention from manufacturers.
But that’s beginning to change. Here are some advances for laptops coming down the pike:
Always-on small screens. Tomorrow’s laptops
will mimic the clamshell-style cell phones, which have a second,
smaller screen on the outside that displays basic information such as
time, date, caller identification and connection accessibility.
Small laptops with phones. In the next year or
two, we should begin to see ultrasmall laptops that have built-in cell
phones.
Touch-screen laptops. Longhorn, the code name
for Microsoft’s next operating system, will be able to handle inputs
from a stylus or finger la tablet PCs.
Better battery monitors. Those
electricity-reserve gauges on today’s laptops are useless; they tell
you 20 minutes of power remain when your laptop’s about to black out
or report no power is left when you have an hour in reserve. Late this
year or early next, expect to see gauges that have an accuracy within
1%.
While we’re on the subject, here are some other advances we’ll start seeing in all computers:
Less reliance on disk drives. Microsoft is
urging laptop and desktop makers to add power-efficient flash memory
drives to store often-used programs. Less reliance on spinning
power-hungry hard drives will shorten computers’ start-up
time—eventually to nearly instantly.
Dual chips that run faster. Manufacturers of
computers’ central processing chips—the computer’s brain—are
introducing a new design that packages together two chips, each
running independently of the other. The chips divide the processing of
a command between them, each solving part of it, and then forward the
completed solution. This parallel processing results in a much faster
computer. The dual chips are being installed in high-power server
computers now and in a year will be introduced in all other ones.
