Mannerisms

Because, the packaging suggests it performs feats which are, on occasions, technically impossible.

Look at speech recognition products. Look at the ads, or the blurb on the package, and you'd expect it to print out words which you dictate into PC.

It doesn't. I've used PC-based speech recognition for ten years, I like it, it's got much better over that time, but I know it doesn't print out the words you dictate to a PC. It prints out some of them. Others are garbled.

I once tried using a voice recorder which claimed to have dictate-to-type capabilities. It suggested that you dictated to it, then plugged it into a PC and out came the dictation.

I knew this claim was a nonsense because I was using the latest speech recognition technology on my PC, and it wasn't able to reproduce directly spoken words. Let alone words going thruogh the distorting medium of a dictaphone. .

Now we're getting the same syndrome with solid state laptops. The glories of SSD are, says the blurb: 'Smaller, faster, lighter, quicker boot, less drain on the battery blah di blah di blah'.

All true, but when it's not the storage, but the display, which is taking up most of the power requirement of a laptop, and when the form factor of the storage module is the same both for HDD as for SSD which at the moment it is, then you're not going to see such a remarkable gain in smaller, lighter, less power etc etc, as might be supposed.

At the moment SSD-based laptops are a bit like those early cars which resembled horse-drawn carriages because car designers hadn't yet figured out a more appropriate shape.

The laptop designed around an SSD looks like being a slow evolution, though Toshiba, with its 64GB SSD 779g Portege with a 12.5 hour battery life, announced this week, has made a good start.

Personally I'd like something like the old Psion 5. Fits in your inside jacket pocket. Keyboard slightly extensible to make it pacticable. Black and white screen. Ethernet port, WiFi.

The trouble is no manufacturer would have the discipline to avoid putting in a phone function, a camera, gaming, a GPS and goodness knows what besides.

They just don't know when to stop.