My dream portable pc

The pieces are finally all here. As you've read previously, I have a new laptop which is enough of a workhorse that I use it for almost everything and leave the desktop off making my living room significantly quieter.

I'm still a little tempted by the new netbooks -- they have a high cute factor and are much more portable than my work-sized laptop, but they are also severely limited in function. So much that I don't think I'd really use one that often. I think Scott Adam's idea of the phone computer of the future is certainly possible, but we don't have the ubiquitous infrastructure to make it realistic yet. Apple's iPhone has certainly stolen a march on the competiton in this direction.

For now though, what I would really like is something the same netbook form factor, tablet interface, mini OS built into bios for quickly getting the web or reading an ebook without needed to boot up a whole os, and finally a really power efficient screen like ePaper.

Lots of companies have gotten on the netbook bandwagon, and at the prices they are selling at, who can blame the public for ditching their blackberries and PDAs for a real computer. These are small and light in a way we always wished laptops would be. The screens are usually acceptably wide, but the pixels come up short in height.

The cool thing about tablet inferface is that you can ditch the keyboard when you don't need it and easily turn the whole thing on its side to read a PDF in portrait layout. There are lots of technical books and manuals I have in pdf, but it's a pain to read them normally since I either have to read the top of the page and then the bottom, going back and forth if there are columns; or I strain to read the page compress to fit the screen.

Splashtop is widely available on ASUS motherboards with other manufacturers starting to join in, notably Lenovo. It's essentially a very thin linux installation that have specific and limited hardware awareness, but will let you surf the web, look at pictures, play music and use skype without starting a whole os which usually takes a minute or so. Splashtop starts up in about 5 seconds. Adding the ability to read ebooks from a memory card port is trivial.

And just announced is Pixel Qi's combo LCD and ePaper display. It will function normally indoors, it will function in full color but without the battery draining backlight* outdoors while remaining perfectly readable. But the coolest trick is a full ePaper mode which uses a small current to change the screen which then remains static drawing no power until the page is changed again. ePaper has a noticeable delay when drawing a new screen and is only a limited greyscale, but you can get thousands of page flips on a small rechargable battery using eReaders like the Kindle or iRex.

All the parts are here, now someone just needs to assemble and sell them. I'll buy one.

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* - To give you a concrete example, my Garmin 296 has five different brighness settings. Using full brightness has a battery life of about an hour and five minutes. Using the most dim, it lasts for almost 6 hours.