Mannerisms

This should be the year of the solid state, flash-based laptop led by Samsung, Toshiba and Apple. Apple is said to be targeting the second half of the year for its introduction.

When the spot price of NAND flash is running at about $8 a gigabyte it's a bit cheeky of Fujitsu to offer a solid state version of its Lifebook laptop for $1,300 more than the HDD version.

Are the laptop manufacturers being clever in charging a fortune for the option of a solid state drive, or are they killing the market?

Despite spending an estimated $6 billion developing Vista, the new Microsoft OS is causing massive pain to early adopters.

An extraordinary row has broken out between Nicholas Negroponte, who heads up the Media Labs at MIT and Intel.

Asked what they had learned from eachother over the years, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates gave revealing answers at the All Things Digital industry conference in California last week.

Could EDA be used to solve the world's most difficult problems e.g. access to food and water, and ending disease and global warming? This is the intriguing thesis of Steven Levitan, Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, and Chairman of DAC being held this week in San Diego.

When the biggest solid state drives seen in laptops seem to be 32GB (Sony, Fujitsu, Dell etc) it comes as a pleasant surprise to see 256GB SSD modules on the market.

Sell the sizzle not the steak is advertising's oldest chiche. Amended for the tech sector, it's: 'Sell version 1.0 as though it's 3.0' Or even version 100.0.

It’s really good to see Intel doing the right thing and, what’s more, it’s good to see Intel apparently doing a U-Turn without blaming anyone else for it.

Sharp has produced a display capable of acting as a keyboard for a laptop computer. What, one wonders, would such a laptop computer look like?

At last, someone has done something special with solid state discs, and people are already raving about it, although it will not become available until next year.

I finally get my hands on an Asus Eee solid state mini-laptop and a fine thing it is.

A Manchester University group, called SpiNNaker, under the leadership of Professor Steve Furber, co-designer of the ARM microprocessor, may have cracked the key problem affecting the widespread adoption of the technology.

Extraordinary how an electronics product can appear from nowhere and take the world by storm. The Asus Eee is now sold out everywhere it was selling. Asus reckons it will sell nearly four million of the little laptops next year.

Just who are these Asus guys? Hard on the heels of its Eee laptop, apparently America’s most wanted Christmas present, is coming a laptop encased in bamboo.

Good news about that perky little Asus Eee, is that its manufacturer is inviting visitors to the Consumer Electronics Show next week to ‘join ASUS, Intel and Sprint to learn about the state of Wimax technology, preview next-generation mobile solutions (including the next generation Eee PC)’.

Maybe Intel’s miserable spat with the OLPC has had some good results, the world is now focussed on low-cost laptops.

Two of Gartner Dataquest’s predictions for the next four years could be feed off eachother: first, that Apple will double its unit market share in the US and Europe by 2011, and second, that half of all travelling workers will leave their laptops at home in favour of other devices by 2012.

The much-to-be-welcomed trend to tiny cheap wireless laptops is strengthening, with Elonex launching a £99 machine to go after the £200 machine of Asus, and others coming from Gigabyte, Medion, Gecube, E-Lead and Clevo.

Intel doesn’t do diversifications. Everyone knows that. Now and again it tries one, just for fun, a bit of video conferencing, ASICs, consumer products, wireless chips, a stab at NAND flash, but it soon pulls out to show that it’s only teasing.

Could Taiwan, Intel’s most fervent collaborator over the years, be preparing a second challenge to Intel’s x86 monopoly?

PC companies and PC dealers in Europe are said to be watching very closely the result of the EC's investigation into Intel's alleged malpractices in the European PC market. If , in the autumn, the EC decides against Intel, as it is rumoured in the German press that it will, then what may follow is a legal class-action brought by PC companies and dealers in Europe which have suffered financial loss from the alleged malpractices.