Is the HPC ahead of its time?

In the future in america will we see more laptops the size of an HPC or smaller? Mauybe the HPC is ahead of its time?

Yes, I do think HPC is ahead of its time, but technology doubles everytime.

In case you haven't seen the future...

http://www.oqo.com

Frankly, I would rather have something that has long whole day battery life than the current 3~4 hours that most of these portable devices tout.

Talking abt battery life, if a manufacturer comes out with a device like ....

1. 3~4 weeks battery life on one charge
2. Monochrome screen (HVGA) (256 grayscale?)
3. Moderate CPU speed (150Mhz ~ 300Mhz) to conserve batt
4. All other standard HPC specs

would you get one?

Its like having the older HPC (1.0/2.0) devices and slapping on a new hi-end li-ion or li-poly batt with 2100AmH.

Why not a color screen? I doubt anyone will produce a unit without a color screen.

From what I've seen, color LCDs generally require a more powerful light to achieve certain legibility, compared to black and white screens.

But I do agree that HPC with b/w screen would be much less useful. I guess it depends on what you want to do. The idea reminds me of the Dana devices; they run on palmOS, have a wide b/w screen, and a full size keyboard. Seems to be designed for typing texts primarily.

As for the question if HPC is ahead of its time... In a sense yes. I'd say they are much more useful to a lot more people because of the wide spread use of the Internet today, coupled with the wireless connectivity.

Before that, people on the go needed to bring a lot of their data with them to do any real work. The HPC simply wouldn't do. Nowadays, much of your data is on the Internet, which means being able to connect is more important than bringing the kitchen sink. This allows the use of much more portable devices for real work.

At this point, there are already a lot of PDA users in the market. Suddenly these people realize the latest and most powerful PDAs can do serious work once it's *connected*. On the other hand, the trend of having bigger and bigger laptops has suddenly taken a U turn, and the trend turned into the "ultra portable" laptops that were once a Japanese exclusive and a niche in the rest of the world.

If the Internet continues to transform the need for power into the need for connectivity, I can see that the PDA continues to grow and the laptop continues to shrink, in the end converging into a single device called the Handheld PC introduced years ago.

Is the HPC ahead of its time? Yes, and no.

Microsoft correctly identified that the platform was a valuable and viable one, and that it was a market that they wanted to "own".

Again, the famous example I cite is Bill Gates saying that Psion were Microsoft's biggest threat. Think about it (ubiquitous efficient computing running off batteries that doesn't need upgrading constantly to do what people want) and you can see why MS were worried.

Microsoft also know how to do "sexy" (of a fashion) in an OS. They know how to make something familiar, usable and reliable-ish. They don't know how to do it particularly efficiently, hence the first WinCE machines were waiting for the hardware powerful enough to run the OS.

If battery and screen technology were better, then HPCs would be considerably better...

But at the moment, I think that the manufacturers are struggling to find the userbase, and are not pushing the user base's correct buttons.