AfterTek

Laptop computers outsell desktops in stores; because the majority of consumers, the smaller devices serve perfectly well as their main computer. That would have been hard to imagine back in the mid-Eighties, when IBM and Apple first introduced their first laptops, each weighing in at about twelve pounds.

And for long time after that, laptops remained either much less functional or much more expensive than the dominant desktops. But now, twenty years later, the laptop has truly become the “desktop replacement.”

A decade or two from now, will there be a laptop replacement? Will an even smaller, more mobile device perhaps something the size of today’s smartphone replace the laptop in the lives of consumers? While it’s once again hard to imagine, in fact much of the technology already exists to make it so.

For starters, there is one very obvious problem: the keyboard. As any smartphone owner knows, keyboards keep shrinking, but fingers do not. Typing on a tiny keypad is no way to write even the shortest memo.

The problem, however, is already being addressed by “virtual keyboards”: devices that project the image of a keyboard onto any flat surface. Optical sensors watch where your fingers move on the projection and record each motion as a keystroke. Odd as it sounds, using one of these soon becomes quite natural: the device even produces a soft click each time you touch a key.

Virtual keyboards are already available as accessories: the I-Tech virtual laser keyboard was the first on the market, a $180 box about the size of a small cellphone that connects to your PDA or smartphone via Bluetooth. While the technology isn’t perfect, it’s improving quickly. More importantly, several companies are racing to be the first to have their virtual keyboard technology directly embedded into a cellphone or PDA.