Big move in a small world

My mobile computing began with a Tandy TRS 80 portable, which had a, as Tim Bajarin explains. tiny 40-characters-wide screen and 128Kb RAM. Back in 1983, it deployed the best technology of the time. A few years later, the advent of the LCD screen dramatically changed portable computing.

Up to that time, the gas-plasma displays were the only flatpanel screens available and they ran so hot that you could fry an egg on them - and they hogged too much power for true mobiles. In 1986, Toshiba introduced the T1000 with its LCD screen, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Other technologies that helped drive portable computing included integrated pointing devices and 2.5in hard drives with multiple platters that today give as much as 18Gb of storage on a laptop.

IBM's Microdrives are the next big leap forward. They begin to ship this summer and they will have major ramifications. They are true hard disks, in a 1in form factor, and logically compatible with the compact-flash standards (CF 1 and CF 2.0) though they will fit only a CF 2.0 slot, or a Type II PC Card adapter.

They will come in 170Mb and 340Mb capacities and cost about $1 per megabyte compared with $5 for compact flash. So 340Mb of storage on a handheld will cost about $350 by the end of this year.

More important still is the fact that this drive will add new capabilities to existing mobiles and perhaps spawn new devices.

The first products that will sport these new drives this year will be digital cameras and Hand PC based computers, all devices which currently boast 4Mb to 8Mb of flash memory. The Microdrive will allow them to store hundreds of pictures or richly formatted documents.

And imagine what they could do for a smart cellphone. Even the latest ones rely on flash memory. When Microdrives become available, we could end up with smart cellphones that can hold large faxes and email attachments.

They could also pack recognition software so that the phone can become a voice transcriber, allowing you to dictate a document for emailing.

And, imagine having a GPS system that could hold on its Microdrive all of the maps of the country you are in, so that you don't need to download specific maps each time you go to a new destination.

Personally, I want a 340Mb Microdrive on my PalmPilot so I can carry much more data with me in this tiny form factor. I also want to see these drives end up in eBooks so that I can carry more than the 8-10 book minimum I can today due to flash RAM restrictions.

And, with a 340Mb Microdrive on my eBook or SoftBook, I could also download hundreds of web pages for reading at my leisure in a mobile setting, as well as hundreds of documents that I might need at my disposal. I could even use the eBook as the primary place I view email if I had the room to store it on these potentially powerful and new mobile-computing platforms.

These Microdrives could also hasten the introduction of wearable computers.

MIT's Media Lab is pioneering products in this area, and although they still need technology breakthroughs in the realm of tiny viewing systems, this Microdrive gives them the ability to create a pocket-sized pack powerful enough to drive the wearable computer of the not-to-distant-future.

Clearly, this new drive represents a key technology in the evolution of mobile computing.

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