The Ultra Mobile PC format is set to have its traditional hard disc technology replaced by solid state memory chips thus improving battery life, making the device lighter and vastly improving start-up times according to an article in The Guardian newspaper:
The PC hard drive could soon be an endangered species. As the price of Flash memory crashes, it is being used in areas traditionally occupied by magnetic storage systems. USB Flash keys are fast becoming the portable storage medium of choice, and a growing number of digital music players (such as Apple's iPod nano) use Flash memory rather than miniature hard drives. Flash memory - specifically, that using NAND logic gates in its transistors, rather than NOR gates, which is slower - is frequently used in games consoles, digital cameras, digital camcorders and mobile phones. But could it really replace a computer hard drive?
Some are trying. In Korea, Samsung has launched two computer products that use solid state drives (SSDs) in place of the conventional magnetic version. Both the NT-Q1-SSD ultra mobile PC (about £1,300) and the NT-Q30-SSD (around £1,900), a 12.1-inch screen notebook, have a 32GB NAND Flash drive. Samsung says there are many benefits to putting an SSD inside a computer, claiming an SSD can read data at 57MB/s and write at 32MB/s, significantly faster than a hard drive's typical 24MB/s, thus offering faster access to applications and slicker multi-tasking.
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Unfortunately the cost as indicated above makes these devices currently prohibitive for many general education applications
"The disadvantage is cost," admits Richard Walsh, Samsung Europe's senior manager for Flash marketing, "but we're targeting our solid state products at the professional executive who's looking for a smaller computer - a kind of 'super Blackberry'. It's for carrying your business applications and not for storing movies or family photos. But NAND Flash prices are falling every year."
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But as the convergence train continues to roll and we combine ever increasing bandwidth connectivity to low cost online storage with the opportunity for store and forward from high speed local storage perhaps we may arrive at the perfect mobile device for teaching and learning.
The Guardian article is
here
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