Meet the Laptop You Will (Won't?) Use In 2015

robert2cane writes "The Compenion concept notebook, designed by Felix Schmidberger, eschews the familiar clamshell design in favor of two superbright organic LED panels that slide into place next to each other, making the notebook just three-quarters of an inch thick." Really this page is just some renderings of some concept computers that are pretty far out of practical production reach. Some interesting ideas, but mostly a whole lot of 'Yeah, right.'

Uhhh OK.

[rodrigoandrade]

>Really this page is just some renderings of some concept computers that are pretty far out of practical production reach. Some >interesting ideas, but mostly a whole lot of yeah right.

Then why is it on /.?? Slow Monday morning?? Whatever happened to the "stuff that MATTERS" part of the slogan??

I bet...

[God of Lemmings]

that Felix Schmidberger looks at his fingers while he types.

Tactile response

[Swizec]

So what's the tactile typing response on those advance touchscreen keyboards of the future?

I bet there will be a lot of disgruntled programmers/novelists/actual-users-of-computers in the future.

New machines need new operating systems...

[ClaraBow]

Hardware designers may come up with some beautiful and innovated designs, but there needs to be a new OS to go with the hardware which will take advantage of the machine's unique design. The iphone works because the software and hardware work together and provide a good user experience. I say this because I noticed on the screenshots that these new amazing machines were running Vista. I know they are just rendered images, but nevertheless, it takes away from the hardwares' appeal. Tablets could have been a great success if the hardware manufactures had used a better OS than XP with some extensions.

'Futurism' reflects the current age

[Langfat]

Ok, not all of it, but most of it.

Case in point? Look at the holographic shark that jumps out of the cinema and bites Marty McFly in Back to the Future II. It looks so 80s because, well, it was made in the 80s. It is likely that even 7 years from now there will be technology which hasn't been invented yet that will be incorporated in every computer -- that is, assuming notebooks are even considered reasonable any more... i personally expect things to go more the way of the iPhone/Archos for portable computation.

No touch screen keyboards please!

[jabjoe]

Why on earth would I want a touch screen keyboard? You can't feel the keys! I touch type solely on the feel of the keys. Why would I want to have to go back to looking down? If I using my hands to input, having to look at them as they do so is wasting my time. Yer they look good on a set of star trek, but in reality that ship would have been destroyed long ago but villains with keyboards they don't have to look down at to press fire. Until the touch screen raises where buttons are, you are using one sense less while working, and if you aren't using that touch screen to look at, what is the point?

Too Much Touch

[Tom]

I'm a big fan of multitouch, and in fact am an early adopter, and one of the probably 2000 or so people who bought a TouchStream (the first multitouch keyboard on the market, many years ago, long before TouchStream went bancrupt and was then acquired by Apple...)

But exactly that experience has taught me one thing: You can't beat tactile feedback for keyboard input. As long as your display doesn't have tactile feedback, multitouch sucks and won't replace a regular keyboard.

What multitouch is great at is analog input, i.e. the stuff we use the mouse for right now. Dragging stuff, resizing stuff, drawing shapes (for gestures or graphics, or to select, whatever) all that kind of things. But when it comes to typing text, you don't want to do that on surface that doesn't give you tactile feedback. FWIW, I can type more error-free with my eyes closed on a regular keyboard, than with my eyes open on a touch-keyboard.

So if those designers could shed their fanboyship of multitouch surfaces for a while, and do what designers ought to do for a change, namely look for the meeting point between form and function, they'd find a lot more and better applications for multitouch displays than keyboard replacements.

Re:The laptop that fits into a steering wheel, gre

[bhima]

I'm pretty sure that future is here now.

Re:I already have it

[drinkypoo]

Hopefully they'll get their act together and actually adopt a standard everyone else uses for once instead of making their own.

Sony? You must be new here. And by here I mean Earth.

Re:Rollable displays and virtual keyboards

[drinkypoo]

Rollable makes little sense because you'll just look like you have a donkey dick in your pocket. It needs to be something that folds up. The ideal interface would just locate your eye and shoot a laser beam through it, some nice people at MIT built some glasses that used lasers mounted to them, that is just the next evolution. When your cellphone is capable of just painting a reality overlay on your retina, you're going to feel stupid carrying a roll of toilet paper around in your pants (especially when everyone is using the three seashells anyway.)

Re:The laptop that fits into a steering wheel, gre

[damburger]

They will, because facebook will be one of the four web sites you can actually access through your entry level 'internet' package.

Re:The laptop that fits into a steering wheel, gre

[elrous0]

It's already bad enough getting rear-ended by some asshole at an intersection who can't wait until he gets home to ask his daughter how her fucking math test went, or ending up in a pileup because some exec suddenly realizes he's not checked his email in *over 2 minutes* as he's driving along the interstate at 70 mph.

Re:The laptop that fits into a steering wheel, gre

[damburger]

Seriously unlikely you are alone; its just socially unacceptable to dissent. It doesn't fit in with the whole, happy-go-lucky Friends coffee house aesthetic that everyone seems to have accepted.

Monthly BIOS license fees, DRM enabled login

[heroine]

The laptop you use in 2015 will require monthly BIOS license fees, monthly service plans to log in, & fall apart in 3 weeks. It'll be made by 5 year old slave kids in Kazakhstan. All data storage will be through wireless networking to the giga corporation & monitored by the FBI for signs of the word "republican" or negative comments about the giga corporation.

However the display will be made out of organic LEDs.

Re:The future - same as today ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in other words, you're Carlos Mencia.

Re:Same old same old

[neokushan]

None of what you mentioned, apart from the touch screen, has changed what the design of laptops or computers in general look like. I already said they got faster, more memory, clearer screens, etc. but when it comes down to it, they're still pretty much the same kinds of machines we used a decade ago.
Optimus keyboards? That's still just a keyboard, it may be a keyboard with fancy lettering on it, but it's purpose and use is identical to the IBM keyboards of the 1980's. 3D Displays? When was the last time you actually seen one of those on a laptop? Even in "real life" situations, nobody's PC or workstation has a 3D display, nearly everything of those that we've seen are just concepts like any other and the production models that DO exist aren't very practical.
When it comes down to it, mobile devices have made the biggest leaps in the last 5 years, mostly because of miniaturisation of existing technology, but nothing really revolutionary has hit us yet. The touch screen you mentioned has been around for a good 10 years or so, but only recently have they become all the rage on the iPhone/iPod touch - how many people do you see with tablet PC's running around, as useful as they are?