I looked at all of the designs, and found none of them particularly compelling - either for now or a few years down the road. All of the notebooks seemed particularly thick, and while I like the idea of a solar powered computer, the offered design is pretty ugly and not very cutting edge.

Picture a familiar guy in a black turtleneck and glasses, and... BOOM! That's it! In other words you SEE nothing. The turtleneck is the input. It has sensors in it to read the vocal nerves. The glasses are the output. They have transparent displays which give heads-up info. [Both these things exist now in the lab.]

Its going to be natural speech, and a heads up display and/or speech output. I know, I know, but it will be, I'm tellin ya! My point is, computers will become invisible soon. Maybe a nondescript black box in the pocketbook or on the belt with a battery and CPU and radios.

Speech! Note in the lab, the hard part has moved from figuring out what words the user is saying, to figuring out what the words are asking the computer to do! If you want to know the next hot career of research, it is working out how to interpret natural, free form input. Get on it, kids!
-Mike from myallo.com

It seems whenever a PC user thinks of a computer, all they can imagine are big, bulky, ugly awkward things made out of cheap plastic. I mean, this is what people think that "gorgeous" computers of the future should look like? I think Jonathan Ive has more creativity in his left pinky toe than all of these people put together.

Maybe, but Dilbert taught us, don't be the one who has someone shout over your cubical wall: "Delete any file."

Spoken commands are great, as long as someone doesn't immitate your voice.

Now if we actually got to the point that voice print identification could not be cracked, maybe I'd trust a computer to allow me to speak to it, but not before then.

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Guest wrote:
Picture a familiar guy in a black turtleneck and glasses, and... BOOM! That's it! In other words you SEE nothing. The turtleneck is the input. It has sensors in it to read the vocal nerves. The glasses are the output. They have transparent displays which give heads-up info. [Both these things exist now in the lab.]

Its going to be natural speech, and a heads up display and/or speech output. I know, I know, but it will be, I'm tellin ya! My point is, computers will become invisible soon. Maybe a nondescript black box in the pocketbook or on the belt with a battery and CPU and radios.

Speech! Note in the lab, the hard part has moved from figuring out what words the user is saying, to figuring out what the words are asking the computer to do! If you want to know the next hot career of research, it is working out how to interpret natural, free form input. Get on it, kids!
-Mike from myallo.com

Can you imagine what it would be like if everybody had speech input portable computers? They'd be walking down the hallways shouting "Point there! Click! Drag to trash! Delete!" or standing in line at Starbucks "Email Fred. I didn't get that attachment. Are you stupid or what?" or sitting down to eat in a fast food joint and some people playing World of Warcraft sit in the booth next to you "Kill the orc! Kill the orc! Stab-stab-stab! Launch fireball!"

And the ultimate nightmare, you're out for a peaceful stroll in the park but everywhere you go you hear a political blogger ranting as loud as he can yell.

seriously bad. and some thicker than a g3 powerbook

I find it amusing that the first one touting the fact that it's "only three-quarters of an inch thick."

Uhhh, the MacBook Air is that thin now. Wow, what visionaries.

Yeah, have to agree - pretty blah imo.

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Dreadnought wrote:
I looked at all of the designs, and found none of them particularly compelling - either for now or a few years down the road. All of the notebooks seemed particularly thick, and while I like the idea of a solar powered computer, the offered design is pretty ugly and not very cutting edge.

Some interesting ideas, but poor implementation. Whoever came up w/ the solar panel tri-fold thing obviously didn't put any thought into where the center of gravity would be, and that extra panel would cause the thing to fall over. The Cario: A laptop you can hook to your steering wheel(?!)... in a word, retarded. The Canova... I definitely see a dual-screen design happening eventually, but man, what a tacky design. The one design that really stood out to me was the slider screen, that looks like it could double as a photo gallery in standby.

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xmattingly wrote:
The Cario: A laptop you can hook to your steering wheel(?!)... in a word, retarded.

The "designers" in the PC world will never understand true design. Not a one of those future laptops is as sleek as the MBA, or even a MB. I can't wait to see what Apple comes out with in the next 10 years.

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xmattingly wrote:
The Cario: A laptop you can hook to your steering wheel(?!)... in a word, retarded.