For all those who use laptops, are you satisfied with your laptop experience? No? Well, there are two new technological developments happening in the research centers and laboratories around the world which will change that.

The first is the ongoing improvements in flash technology. Flash memory is a solid state, random access, writable, non volatile memory. What's that? It means that it is a memory device which can be written to and read from just as the RAM that we all are familiar with. However it does not lose the information that is stored in in when the power is switched off. The interesting part is that thoughts are floating around about using it instead of a hard disk drive. If they manage to do this, it would mean lesser moving parts in the laptop. Less heat dissipation. Less power consumption. Less wear and tear. So what's stopping them? Cost per GB. Technical limitations. Hard disk capacities have reached well over 100 GB for laptops. Flash devices have a lot of catching up to do. Also manufacturing flash memory chips currently costs a lot more than manufacturing hard disks. Well, research in on ...

The second development is the organic LED (light emitting diode). The basic material behing this technology are chemicals (rather organic polymers) which emit light when an electrical field is applied to them. These are slated to replace liquid crystal displays. The potential is enormous. Display units manufactured from OLEDs are less power intensive. As the polymer's themselves emit light, there is no need for backlighting. This means thinner and lighter display units. Moreover these chemicals can be mounted on flexible plastic substrates. Which means that display units can be light and flexible. Demonstration videos of this technology are already on youtube. So what's the catch? Durability. The OLED polymers that have been synthesized so far have a limited lifespan. They emit light in response to electrical fields for a few thousand hours and then burn out. Again researchers are hard at work to remedy this flaw ...

I fervently hope that researchers apply themselves to the one biggest obstacle the is preventing a laptop from being a lap-top - hot processors. Anyone looking into this little problem...?