Personalisation is more than just a choice in colours.
In the mobile computing world, quad core processing and chipset refreshes are almost as certain as death and taxes. Fortunately, 2008 looks set to be a more exciting year than simply watching specifications grow.
The recent Consumer Electronics Show proved to be a fertile ground for the latest breakthroughs in technology. However, many of the prototypes showcased may take years before hitting the retail market, assuming they are not vapourware. For now, check out our educated guesses at which areas in mobile computing are likely to make the most impact in the coming year.
UMPCs (almost) equal ultraportables in performance
The ASUS Eee PC did more for the UMPC cause than others did due to its ground-breaking price point. This will pave the way for more vendors entering this niche market with cheaper or more powerful products.
Though the original intent was for UMPCs to become companions for your primary computing device, this group of machines may soon hit the same performance bracket as full-fledge ultraportables. Already, models like the Gigabyte U60 and Packard Bell EasyNote XS20 are running at 1GHz clockspeed. With the combination of faster flash-based storage and improved graphics engines, the time may come when choosing between a UMPC and an ultraportable becomes a matter of screen size preference.
Design becomes as important as specifications
With Intel dominating the mobile processor and chipset scene, there is really very little performance difference between getting a laptop from a premium vendor versus one from a budget manufacturer. So getting notebooks based on specifications have become as useful as buying a car based on the number of tires.
2007 was a colourful year as various vendors like Dell and Sony decided to differentiate their products by offering a range of colors. HP went down another path and started a range of limited-edition models sporting unique HP Imprint designs. Yet another maker, Fujitsu, adopted a different approach by squeezing a 14.1-inch display into a 13.3-inch chassis. Who knows, perhaps soon your friendly sales assistant might have to start taking lessons on aesthetics rather than technology.
The Dell XPS M1730 made us drool with its amazing gaming benchmark score.
Mobile gaming hits new highs
While US gamers have been happily shooting and looting with insanely fast laptops holding dual graphics cards (GPU), Asian consumers have had to meddle around with single-GPU notebooks for far too long. Thanks to Dell, the XPS M1730 finally made its way to our shores and changed the way we think about mobile gaming.
From here on out, any laptop which claims to cater to the gaming crowd will certainly need to offer dual GPUs in order to be taken seriously. In fact, Nvidia has already announced that its new SLI configuration is compatible with three video cards. Though we doubt a tri-GPU portable will appear anytime this year, we can always hope.
More laptops get the SSD treatment
Since the processor and graphics card of a laptop are decided at birth (barring major and warranty-voiding surgery), the primary method of improving a notebook's performance hardware-wise used to be by upgrading the memory. Not anymore. The rise of the solid state drive (SSD) offers another viable method to boost your machine speed.
Based on flash technology, SSD contains no moving parts and offers a significantly faster access speed than conventional magnetic platters. The cost of current 32GB and 64GB laptop drives, however, is prohibitively expensive. But with prices dropping fast, the time is nigh when SSDs shall rule over harddisks.
Multi-touch becomes the new keyword
The iPhone changed the way we viewed touch technology. More than just a method of selecting applications, Apple leveraged on the fact that we have more than one finger and invented a new way to control our devices, hence creating the multi-touch interface. While the rumours of an upcoming Mac tablet haven't come true yet, the MacBook Air does have a multitouch trackpad, and we expect multi-touch to take off in the next few years.
Tablet PCs, despite their great promise, never did become popular with the mass consumer who probably didn't feel that writing on the screen was worth the extra premium. Add to the fact that value manufacturers like Dell are entering the tablet PC market, and multi-touch technology may be the tipping point for this laptop category.
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