Lately I’ve been discussing with some friends what kind of new features the next generation of laptops will bring.
Not things like more memory or huge disks, that is a given, but things would make the same kind of impact as the DVD-recorder or the integrated Wi-Fi or Bluetooth did.
Opinions are hard to give since we really can’t foresee how things will change. One year ago (more or less) it was more or less apparent that the main revolution would be wireless ubiquity, but now we are a bit hard-pressed to come up with the next killer tech.
But we did come up with some things, even if they already exist in one way or another.
And one of the things I see coming (and would rather enjoy myself to tell the truth) would be built-in cameras with decent image quality in every laptop. Not the kind you use to take pictures of your surroundings but a fixed camera that points straight at the user and that would be used in video-conference (much like the integrated microphone that most laptops have nowadays).
I know that some of Sony’s Vaios laptops have had this for years, but I am talking mass-market here and the Vaio, sexy as it is, is still a niche-market product.
Now the funny part of it is that we had this conversations oh, a week or two ago and today I got pointed at this piece of news which comes along to prove that we weren’t all that off the mark.
Very nice. I wonder how long until Apple starts integrating something like this on their excellent laptops? Probably ages I would guess…
Oh well, good things loom ahead of us.
Now the other feature I would love to have would be for my laptop to have a built-in GPS receiver. Yes, I know, probably not much market for it so not much chance of it happening, but still I would rather like it.