2014-07-10
I'm talking about the replacement of your laptop computer. We already have phones with projection capabilities, such as Samsung Galaxy Beam. Whatever you may think of this particular piece of equipment, it's a step in the right direction. We have infrared keyboards, they are available today. We have mobile phones that can be extremely small but with extremely powerful brains.

At some point, one way or another, something else, something neater will be replacing our laptops. But until that happens, why wouldn't we build a mobile-phone sized computer. So that instead of traveling with a laptop you could actually just take with you a phone-like small box that would be three in one - the computer brain, the screen/projector and a keyboard, with an optional one-finger thimble-like mouse on top of your finger that works wireless. The end result would be perfect.



Travelers would love it, everyone on the move and having to work every now and then would love it. It's something many of us have been dreaming of for a long time already.
The technology is there today to build it. But based on what I've found, there's really no such thing out there yet. And I can't honestly understand why. I'm a freakin' journalist, or actually not even that, if not counting the degree, I do stuff for the living that even I can't understand most of the time, the whys and whats. But for real skilled engineers, programmers and designers coming together putting something like this together should not be anything too difficult.

In essence, by the end of the day, you simply need to create a box. A really small box, whatever shape it would be, a phone, a remote, or a dildo, it would have to include everything necessary so that when you press the power button, the OS (whatever it would be, Windows, Linux, or anything else) would start, the screen would be projected on a wall and the infrared keyboard on your table.

The nice thing about a projecton screen is that you don't really need a wall to see it. It would suffice if you simply went to a cafeteria, took the menu holder, replaced the menu with a big clean paper and project the screen there. In theory, in my mind, it could work perfectly.

 article about laptop concept
That's how it could look like. Let's call it EIFU, short for....nothing really.


Potential issues


Of course, there are couple of things that might complicate the (commercial) production of such a device.
  • The giants
    Talking about the leading electronics companies there and the chance that the average Joe (who would still have to be a PRO engineer) would be creating it, using mainly the parts of existing hardware and software out there. I'm not really at home with the patent laws and everything else related to it, but if the shit would actually become a hit, the lawsuits would follow. But...for the time being, this is just something to think about, it should definitely not put someone off.
  • Battery
    If you have a really small and cool laptop, we would all enjoy if we didn't have to carry with us a charger at all times. Especially when you consider the average battery-time of today's smartphones, which, when you start thinking about it, are anything but smart in that sense. And what we are talking about would be requiring a lot more power than those "smart" phones - a computer, infrareds, and a projector all at the very same time.

    For the time being carrying a charger with you at all times might be the only way to go, but soon this issue might be resolved with the help from the Alliance for Wireless Power. Wireless charging will soon be reality and this will also solve this problem.


And where to then?


Obviously, what I've described here would be only the first step. Something that could be created already today but for some reason hasn't. But as the technology advances, the idea is to move on from video projectors to holographic projection.

What do you think about it? Could it be done? And most importantly, why hasn't it been done?