The technology already serves a niche market - small, high-quality displays for mobile phones and media players.
But this technology looks to be a bit further out.Ĭompared to conventional LCDs, organic displays are thinner, brighter and less power hungry. Just as solid state memory could transform notebook storage, OLED (organic light emitting diode) displays could radically change the way users look at their systems. "The rest will slowly transition to hybrid drives, where you have magnetics but also a front-end solid state component to speed them up, which also helps power management," he says. Gold Associates, a technology strategy consulting firm. Gold, president and principal analyst of J. Within three years, about 15 percent of enterprise-class notebooks will have pure solid state drives, predicts Jack E. "By getting rid of spinning hard drives, you will both boost the seek time and save energy." "The benefits will be enormous," he says. "Solid state drives - flash memory - will change notebooks by providing a medium that's faster, less fragile and more power friendly," he says.ĭuring the next few years, solid state technology's biggest challenges - its high cost and relatively low capacity (the current ceiling is about 64GB per solid state drive) - should fade away, Shim says. At the same time, a storage revolution promises to attack several notebook problems, including weight, speed and power drain, says Richard Shim, a notebook analyst at IDC. What kind of design changes are we talking about? Look for more case colors, more metals, sleeker designs, brighter displays, better speakers, better integrated cameras, quieter fans, lighted keyboards, secondary displays and more exotic screen hinges, Enderle says. If one company has its way, you may also be able to use those machines for quick e-mails and Web browsing without firing up Windows. Does a three-pound laptop that runs some eight hours sound good to you? Then you may like the machines of 2011. "Notebooks are rapidly evolving and improving," says Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group consultancy. Notebook makers are prioritizing improvements to design, storage (Compare Storage Resource Management products), and displays that could make the notebooks of 2011 quite different than the workhorses of today. Yet as 2008 dawns, CIOs have some reason for optimism. "There's plenty of room for improvement," Vitus says. "Like button placement."Įven today, many CIOs feel that too many notebooks have batteries that conk out in the middle of a job, weigh too much, or fail to keep critical information secure (Compare Data Leak Protection products). "Not only on the big issues, but also on the little things," he says. Notebook vendors should pay more attention to their enterprise customers, says Gabriel Vitus, IT director of the Vancouver-based Certified General Accountants Association of Canada.