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The new must-have gadget: Flash laptops

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The entire world is now slowly shifting to Flash-based storage in mobile devices. The latest trend is to get rid of harddisks in your laptop - and you will have longer battery life, faster shutdown/reboot, better shock-resistance. Not to mention that flash memory takes less space than a harddisk.

Fujitsu follows this trend with their NAND-convertible Lifebook laptops:

Fujitsu is estimating that it will receive roughly 20,000 orders for its new NAND-convertible Lifebook laptops through March. If 20 percent of those orders specify a flash drive, as Yamamoto predicts, that figure will amount to 4,000 computers with flash.

Replacing the standard hard disk drive on Fujitsu's new laptops with a flash drive would make the laptops lighter and more shock-resistant, extend battery life by 30 minutes and cut in half the time required to start up Windows. But replacing a 20GB hard drive with a 16GB worth of flash memory would cost an extra $670 (80,000 yen). That figure would be $1,335 to switch to a 32GB flash drive .

"The price is high, but we judged there is adequate demand from companies for NAND PCs, which greatly reduce the risk of losing data," Yamamoto said. "It may be a slow start, but we want to be ready when laptops will be as handy as mobile phones."

[source: CNet]

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