3 comments to “A vision for a future laptop”

1. On Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 3:24 pm Pearl wrote:

   They finally did it. They took away that final button.

   Will the keyboard go next?

2. On Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 8:25 am Nick Harris wrote:

   I don’t need a clamshell laptop, they are no good for graphics work anyway as the screen is always too small. What I need is a rugged, waterproof, keyboard with a very long-lasting battery. It would have a narrow single-line “display-strip”, that went the full width of the keyboard.

   The UI would be textual, just a simple word processor. It would only do graphics, etc. when connected wirelessly to a workstation and its monitor (i.e. it would have no power-hungry GPU itself). A separate pointing device would be used, which would be found at the site of the workstation! So no trackpad would be needed.

   Hence you could take this “use immediately” without having to open it up ‘Notebook’ word processor, where any key press would wake it from sleep (there would be no ON/OFF) and put that character onto the display-line at the cursor position – i.e. it wouldn’t “eat” your information and would be always ready.

   The keyboard would be backlit with an ambient light sensor and the display line would probably be white on black characters to reduce intrusion within conferences – as the other way is like having a small torch shining out; this is an important point as it would not be angled inwards towards the user and simultaneously shielded from the “speaker on stage”, only annoying those seated behind you, in the manner of a normal laptop.

   There would be no removable storage, discs or USB ports.

   The display-line would have an always central cursor and the text would be entered as one continual line with paragraphs marked by the Pilcrow sign and § for sections etc. However, META keys would allow rapid traversal of this “long string” that represented the text document allowing you to jump back and forth between sections and paragraphs although there would be NO up/down traversal of lines as there was NO word wrap.

   The keyboard would be as dinky as this Apple one:

   http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB167B/A?fnode=MTY1NDA1Mg&mco=MjMwMjI4MA

   but with the display line, it would look more like this:

   http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/CambridgeZ88.jpg

   only with fewer lines in its embedded display, or this:

   http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/GBS-Newbrain-AD-2.jpg

   with a wider embedded display that can be seen in the dark.

   And yes, anyone can steal this idea of mine as I am not in the position of building my own hardware!

3. On Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 6:00 pm Miles Schreffler wrote:

   I would like to say, excellent page. Im not sure if it has been talked about, but when using Chrome I can never get the entire page to load without refreshing several times. Could just be my connection. Enjoy!

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