Here’s a shortened list of in my opinion - 5 of the coolest looking concepts ideas and styles for a modern laptop.  Some of these laptops have many shapes and sizes. Thanks to list phobia.

1. Vaio Zoom

This concept includes a holographic glass monitor that appears to be transparent and a keyboard that turns opaque when its turned off.

2. DesCom

This laptop integrates itself into the users desk - when screen is folded down the desk looks normal.

3. Compenion

This concept was created by Felis Schmidberger. It consists of two sliding OLED screens, and can be used as a keyboard.

4. Samsung Amoled

A unique design by Samsung which includes a sleep touch-sensitive keyboard. Where’s the mouse pad I wonder?

5. Canvas

Canvas is a laptop concept that is supposed to provide a better quality experience for the designer. It would include a very thin touchscreen.

Many new and great things are coming out of Intel’s research department. This cool new innovation is called “Witriciy”. It basically transmits electricity through thin air to power a selected device. This great innovation will hopefully be implemented into tables and work surfaces so that as soon as a device is placed on a surface it will be able to receive power.

The technology uses magnetic fields to transfer up to 60 watts of power. With a distance of up to around two to three feet away, but it loses around 25% of power during the transmission phase. The new technology would initially be used to charge the battery of devices such as laptops, cameras, and cell phones, but Intel hopes to eventually eliminate the use of batteries altogether.

However Witricity is still in the early stages of development and a lot more research is required before the technology goes to the market. Witricity is something I would like to see working some time soon and I think it has a lot potential.

The new USB 3.0 can boast a huge increase in performance compared to 2.0. Around 10 times the speed capability! This amounts to a whopping 600 MB/s. This is the equivalent to copying an enormous 25 Gigabytes in only seventy seconds. Where USB 2.0 would take fourteen minutes and 1.1 would take nine hours! It will be due for release to consumers in 2009 or 2010 and will be compatible with the old USB 2.0 and 1.1 ports.

As the General manager of the chipset business unit at AMD said “The future of computing and consumer devices is increasingly visual and bandwidth intensive. Lifestyles filled with HD media and digital audio demand quick and universal data transfer. USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform.” Formats such as Blu-ray DVD are the next generation in entertainment. Without USB 3.0 there would almost be no point in having such formats without the speed capabilities of USB 3.0. I look foward to using it!

The Microvision Pico Projector - The ultimate accessory in portable viewing devices. The PicoP is an Ultra miniature projector capable of producing full colour, high-resolution images but still being small enough and low power enough to work with an accessory that it would connect to, like a Mobile device or an iPod.

An accessory Pico projector turns photos, videos, and other content into big viewing experiences that can be shared with others. Projected content is delivered to the accessory projector from common video out connections on cell phones, personal media players, laptops, digital cameras and other mobile devices. Accessory projectors leverage Microvision’s PicoP display engine which at its heart, contains Microvision’s patented MEMS scanner. Other technology components include, laser light sources, optics, and electronics. These components are brought to life using Microvision’s proprietary software and expertise.

I think this really is a great innovative piece of technology. Everything is getting smaller and smaller these days. Soon this projector might even be imbedded into a cellphone or laptop! Would that be amazing? The PicoP projector will be availiable sometime next year. Heres a nice video showing the PicoP in action:

Solid State Drives are advancing at a steady pace but now SanDisk have made the announcement of their new so called “ExtremeFFS (Flash File System)”. Its basically a new file system, but it uses page-based methods so all the locations of data on the drive wont be in just one place. This means that the new drives can achieve random write speeds of around 100 times faster compared with today’s current hard drive technology.

Now SanDisk hopes that with this new found technology coupled with other upcoming features they will lead the adoption of SSDs in computers and laptops. These hard drives would be a nice addition to the new and upcoming Windows 7 as unlike with Vista, Windows 7 will optimize the use of all storage space. SanDisk are expecting to ship the drives in 2009.

This is probably something to really look forward to. Especially for extreme PC enthusiasts.. But I don’t think these new drives will be cheap! As currently a 64GB Solid State Drive costs around $300!! I wonder what these will cost? Your thoughts and opinions are appreciated!

These tubes are flexible, stretchable, transparent sheets of carbon can now serve as loud speakers! Chinese researchers found that the loudspeakers can be made into almost any size, shape or form. To show off their newly found audio device they recorded this video, there are no other speakers anywhere in this video! The nanotubes are the only things generating the music.

The physicist Kaili Jiang at the Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Centre in Beijing and his colleagues have created their version of loudspeakers from sheets of carbon nanotubes, each sheet is around 10 nanometres across!

The nanotubes create sound by applying an electric current alternating at an audio frequency to these thin films. They were pleasantly surprised with the result - the speakers could produce sounds just as loud as commercial speakers. Physical chemist - Howard Schmidt at the Rice University in Houston, Texas mentioned; “It is so wonderfully simple, that it brings up a strong wave of “Duh, why didn’t I think of that!”

These nanotube speakers can be stretched up to twice their normal size without breaking! bad with little change to the quality and intensity of the sound. As they are transparent they could be placed almost anywhere, Video screens, windows, paintings or even clothing as they are so flexible.

I think its pretty amazing what they’ve done here. The possibilities are endless! Not to mention a huge market.. These tubes could be the future of audio. The researchers have already attached one of the transparent films to the screen of an iPod, to play sound from the device.

The new Intel Nehalem Chip will save around $2 Billion in energy cost for up an amazing 20 terabyte hours. This microprocessor has been designed with the environment in mind. The chip does not lose any performance from being so energy efficient which should appeal to a wider range of customers. Intel named the processor “Nehalem” it follows after the Intel Core 2 and Quad series of Processors.

One of the head engineers at Intel said “Going into this project … we insisted on energy efficiency … and power, adding more processing speed to a chip often requires pulling a lot more energy. Meeting this challenge was not an easy one”.

The Nehalem engineers had to alter the processors clock cycle and its operating voltage, both of these use a lot of energy. They point out the biggest energy cut came from reducing the usage on an idle machine as a lot of a processors life is when its idle..

Though you can’t make such an improvement without having some set backs. The catch is the chip still needs to be active enough so that it can receive instructions on command. Usually, processors are fully powered during idle stages in order to receive any instructions. But not anymore, with the new Nehalem microprocessor hopefully computers will save much more power. If it has a good performance rating I would definitely consider purchasing one (depending on the price of course) but if it also saves just that bit more in electricity its probably worth it in the long run aswell. Here’s some very impressive figures:

VoodooPC’s “Envy 133″ is now a contender in the worlds thinnest laptop market! It has just began shipping. This laptop can run Vista with ease, its an incredibly durable and super light machine that boasts a carbon-fiber frame. Basically its nearly the size of the MacBook Air but has a lot more features put into it. It also comes with its own pre-installed Linux based operating system that can boot up within a second!. Although it may cost much more than most laptops that can execute similar tasks it does it all in almost half the size! This laptop is not made for a gamers but it can still handle your “average” PC game with no trouble.

In the words of the voodoo CEO Rahul Sood “This laptop is not a gaming product.” It’s not going to play Crysis at all, though it might achieve other, lesser games with the settings dialed down. You can tell it’s not a gaming laptop because of the fact that Vista gives it a 3.1 rating out of 5 due to its integrated graphics and shared video memory; that PCMark gave it 2100 (the world’s hottest machines top 15000); 3D Mark won’t run because Envy’s nice 13.3″..

Envy’s carbon fiber casing lets heat dissipate easily, though it still comes with a noisy fan.. However there will be no sudden burning feelings on your lap while you use it! The Envy’s speakers sound great for being so small. They are better than the MacBook Air’s crappy “Mono Speaker” and even the MacBook Pro’s Stereo speakers.

Unfortunately there are some downsides to the Envy. The battery life is not too great. It can play a DVD Movie for about one hour before it completely turns itself off. So no watching movies on long trips with this laptop.. The envy also is quite pricey a fairly basic config with an 80GB 4200rpm hard drive starts at $2,450, and the 64GB SSD versions don’t even kick in till $2,900. The most simple unit available is $2,100.

You can read more about the Envy on Voodoos Website. Or you can watch Rahul Sood introducing the Laptop in Germany to the market. Here: