This is the year of the solid state, flash-based laptop. Those expected to be entering the market are Samsung, Toshiba, Acer and Apple but, first out of the starting blocks is Fujitsu, which launched a solid state laptop last week.
The solid state laptop is a truly great idea which has only become feasible with the rapid erosion of the flash memory price.
Having said that, Psion had a solid state laptop on the market twenty years ago which owners raved over though, like much of Psion’s stuff at the time, connectivity was a problem.
The Fujitsu solid state laptop comes as an alternative version to its Lifebook series. These are ultra-compact laptops with nine inch screens, weighing 1.5kg with a hard drive, and they’ll weigh half that, around 1.5lbs with a solid state drive.
Other benefits of solid state are that the drive generates zero heat, it is twice as fast to read as a disc drive, and it writes 60 times faster than HDD. Power consumption, boot times and latency with data traffic are less than with disc drive.
The snag with the Fujitsu solid state laptops is that they cost $600 more than an HDD version for a 16Gbyte drive and $1,300 more for a 32Gbyte drive. Why this should be so when 32Gbytes of NAND flash goes for around $160 is a mystery. One explanation is that Fujitsu is initially targeting businesses.
However, later this year, solid state laptops from Apple, Toshiba, Acer and Samsung among others are expected to hit the market targeting consumers with more realistic pricing.
A force driving cost-reduction in NAND flash is 4bit-per-cell technology which Spansion started producing at the end of last year and which the new joint venture between Hynix and SanDisk will be targeting.
Doubling density for the same cost should make solid state laptops economically very attractive.