Laptops of the Future Promise Sleek Designs, Smarter Storage
John Edwards, CIO, November 19, 2007
Excerpts from the article:
...notebooks face an obesity crisis. Vendors must respond to increasing performance demands while keeping their products from inflating to unacceptable dimensions.
To balance the parameters of weight and size, batter life, durability, security and performance, notebook vendors must work as carefully and precisely as a Swiss watchmaker. And to counter bloat, vendors are looking to lighter materials, more highly integrated components and new space-saving design approaches.
Compared to conventional LCDs, organic displays are thinner, brighter and less power hungry. The technology already serves a niche market—small, high-quality displays for mobile phones and media players...
Because organic displays emit light rather than reflect it, the screens provide significantly better outdoor viewing than most current notebook LCDs, which wash out in sunlight. Flexible organic displays are also more or less unbreakable, says Robert Street, a senior research fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). "That would be a huge benefit in notebooks, especially in ruggedized models," he notes.
The problem is, manufacturers haven't figured out how to affordably mass-produce them yet...
Building affordable organic displays into notebooks will require transforming laboratory techniques into affordable processes for volume production. "We think that an inkjet printing-based approach shows great promise," Street says. He says it may be only a couple or years before the first notebooks featuring organic displays begin appearing on the market. Some notebook vendors say the wait for OLED's debut may be more like four years.
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