wepc.com

[tim987]

For those that don't know, wepc.com is a place where people can submit their ideas for laptops that they think asus and intel should build. Asus and intel read the ideas and your idea could be built.People vote for ideas.

 

I think there are some great ideas there and I just want to know what ideas you have voted for? My ideas for laptops are located here:

 

http://www.wepc.com/vote/view/idea/2616/in...p_gadgets_ideas

 

My ideas have currently got 9 votes. I put so many ideas in, but I'm sure all of them could fit inside a laptop.

 

[Fozzy Fozborne]

"The laptop screen lid should have the border of it glow in the dark so people can find their laptop in the dark."

 

If you don't know where your laptop is, you probably shouldn't own one.

 

"All laptops should have software to display the health of a laptop battery and hard drive. It should be displayed in percentage. eg. battery health 98%, hard drive health 91%. When the health gets very bad a popup box should be displayed and tell people to backup important files to CD/DVD."

 

Good idea except for the fact that Li-ion batteries and hard drives often die rapidly without any warning so it would really be useless. Also, SMART capable drives already display their projected lifetime remaining, so that would be redundant.

 

"The laptop battery indicator should show how much battery power is left in hours and minutes and seconds, instead of percentage. eg. 1hr 16mins 22secs of battery remaining."

 

I know XP shows it in minutes and seconds, not sure about Vista, though.

 

"All laptops should come with a USB 2.0 color printer/scanner."

 

And that would massively increase the weight/size and price of the PC.

 

"The laptop screen should stop glare from the sun and lights."

 

Matte screens are available and are efficient at stopping glare, as for sunlight, there are screen covers that block light from washing out the screen.

 

"All laptops should have a backlit keyboard so people can see the keyboard at night when the lights are off."

 

These are very expensive to make and would obviously increase the price. They also draw a surprising amount of juice from the battery.

 

"The onboard Integrated graphics unit that comes on most new laptop motherboards should give better graphics because alot of 3D computer games need dedicated graphics cards because the onboard graphics is not powerful enough because it uses system RAM. Maybe the onboard GPU could have it's own 1GB of dedicated VRAM."

 

Again, expensive and useless for most people. It would also draw more power from the battery.

 

"Develop an inbuilt plug for the laptop that lets you connect as many laptops together as you want so you can use them as a cluster of servers. So for example you could connect 100 laptops together using the inbuilt plug(with a cable) and all these laptops would be running as one computer that share the hard drive space and cpus. It should include software to configure all this too and the software should support cpanel."

 

Not possible because Windows doesn't support anything like that.

 

"All laptops should include a Blu-ray player/burner that can also read cd's and dvd's and also burn cds and dvds. The drive should be able to support all region DVDs because different country's DVDs have different regions."

 

Blu-ray burners for laptops cost around $400. How can you suggest that a $500 laptop drive include a $400 part? Also, region-free DVD players are illegal for sale in many countries because of DVD agreements.

 

"Develop a 1TB hard drive for laptops. As far as I know a laptop that currently has 1TB of hard drive space is actually two 500GB hard drives installed into the laptop. You should develop a single 1TB internal hard drive for a laptop."

 

1.2 TB drives are almost available.

 

"Have a laptop motherboard that has 2 CPU slots so 2 seperate identical CPU's can be installed. I know there are dual core cpu's but having 2 seperate cpu's will make the laptop alot faster especially being able to run the laptop as a server."

 

Not possible because of physical limitations (dual socket desktop motherboards require an extended ATX case to fit into). Also, almost no applications and games support more than dual core cpu's. There are also always quad-core laptops. Also keep in mind that dual-socket means dual heat and power requirements.

 

"All laptops should have a Built in 12Megapixel High Definition webcam with microphone and speakers. It should take 12MP still photos and 12MP HD videos."

 

Which would require massive processing power to run mainly coming from the graphics card that most laptops aren't equipped with.

 

"All laptops should have a Built in 3G(HSPA+) chip. It is backwards compatible with W-CDMA(UMTS) and GSM. It has 42Mbps download speed and 22Mbps upload speed. The chip should support the 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 1900 MHz, and 2100 MHz bands so laptop users can go to any country in the world and have 3G wireless broadband. There should be an internal aerial. It should come with software that works in Microsoft Windows so people can easily set this up. The advantage over Wifi is that 3G uses the wireless carrier's cellphone network which works over 62miles and wifi only works from your house to outside your house."

 

Such devices are about $400-500 without a contract and many high-end laptops are already equipped with them.

 

That's why none of these ideas have been implemented yet and almost all of them won't be.

Edited November 24, 2008 by Fozzy Fozborne