7. Portable Printing, Presentations and Power

Next time you check in online to fly home and curse your hotel for not having a printer you can use, you might wish you had PLANon’s PrintStik in your bag. Developed by the designer of the DocuPen scanner and the PocketSurfer Internet device, it uses the same thermal printing as till receipts and credit card machines so the pages only last six to eight months (depending on the temperature you store them at) but this lightweight $299 model is for emergency printing rather than archiving. The rechargeable battery prints 30 pages on a single charge. You only get 20 pages from a $25 roll of paper, but if you’re only printing a boarding pass, the PrintStik doesn’t use up a full letter sheet each time.

ZPower has been working on its silver zinc battery technology for several years and the company finally has a deal with a major laptop manufacturer to put it in a high-end laptop that will reach the market in September 2008. The charging circuitry has to be built in, so you can’t upgrade existing notebooks to get what the company claims is 40% better than lithium ion battery life. Silver zinc is good news for flying, too; it uses a water-based electrolyte so batteries won’t catch fire and the FAA has already approved them for hold and cabin baggage alike. If you don’t switch to a whole new battery technology, “you get at best 10% a year in improved battery life” the CTO of HP’s personal systems group, Phil McKinney, told us at CES. His prediction for better battery life is the switch to SSD, once 128-GB models are available in volume in the second half of 2008. Ritek will offer 2.5” 128-GB SSDs this year, which the company believes will appeal to enthusiast desktop gamers who want to reduce the loading time of games. Samsung previewed a 1.8” 128-GB SSD at CES and SanDisk will have a slimmed-down 1.8” 72-GB SSD for notebooks in the summer.

But in general, manufacturers like SanDisk, Ritech and Lexar predict that volume shipments of 1.8” drives this year will be at capacities of 32 GB and 64 GB. With price tags around $700 and $1,400, these appeal mainly to enterprises wanting to avoid maintenance costs from failed hard drives and lost business data. Prices will drop according to analyst firm iSuppli, from $8.50 per gigabyte last year to just 88 cents in 2011. However, hard drive prices currently at 47 cents per gigabyte will go down to 11 cents at the same time. Hybrid hard drives will represent a large proportion of the market; only 23% of notebooks in 2011 will have a traditional hard drive alone.