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When you spend around
A$4 billion a year on R&D
(approximately six times
the CSIRO’s annual budget)
you tend to come up with a
lot of new ideas. In fact, we earned
over 1,250 patents in the USA alone in
2005 (and over 1,300 the year before) -
the ninth highest of any company in
the world.
This river of ideas is what drives the
evolution of ever smaller, more powerful,
more versatile and more reliable Notebooks.
Here are some of the technologies that
are moving out of our laboratories and
into production. They’ll be popping up
in our Notebooks in the near future.
Coming any second –
batteries that recharge in a minute.
Downtime is frown time. So a recent breakthrough in
Toshiba’s research labs is good news. A bit of neat
nanotechnology has led to the development of a battery
than can be recharged sixty times as fast as the advanced
lithium-ion varieties in widespread use today (which were,
incidentally, originally developed by Toshiba).
The result: a battery that can reach 80%
of capacity in 60 seconds flat.
Who needs batteries anyway?
Without a power point, a Notebook with a flat battery
is just excess baggage. So developing alternatives is a
priority at Toshiba.
That’s why we’re working on fuel cells. One day, this
technology may replace all sorts of things, including
power stations and the internal combustion engine
(that’s a decade or two away!). In the meantime, fuel
cells are on the verge of moving into Notebooks.
Toshiba’s most advanced model is a thumb-size unit*
that’ll run an MP3 player for 20 hours on a single fill
of methanol. Next? Notebooks that’ll go for days
between refills.
*
recognised by the Guinness Book of Records 2006 edition
as the world’s smallest.
A very small achievement.
Modesty aside, Toshiba leads the world in hard disk
drive technology. In fact, we developed both the current
industry-best 1.8” variety and the ubiquitous 2.5”.
Now we’ve pushed the envelope even further – and
picked up another envelope from the Guinness Book
of Records – by producing a 0.85” hard disk drive that
holds 4GB of data. All that info on a disk smaller than
a 10-cent piece! It’ll open up brand new opportunities
to think small in Notebooks.
Get up to speed with WiMax.
WiMax is the next generation of wireless.
It’ll let you to connect from a longer range at
higher speeds – we’re talking 3km and speeds of up
to 15 MB/sec. Think of it as broadband without wires.
Or the best thing since, er, wireless.