Improvements and upgrades for netbooks expected in the next couple of years

I am following the story of netbooks being the Cinderella of laptop computers market with it's huge growth in sales. That together with the fact that laptop computers outsold desktop computers made some impression and force manufacturers to consider important upgrades for this new gadget. Steve Kleynhans, a research vice president at Gartner Inc said: "2009 and 2010 will be big years for mobility, with major advances coming that will affect what we carry and how we work and play." But while notebooks work well as a second or third computer, they lack the performance needed for a primary work system. That will change quickly later this year. Intel will start shipping the Model 330 Atom processor with a pair of computational cores, like the Core 2 Duo chips, for better performance through heavy-duty work. Right now, computer makers are sampling the chip and integrating it into a new generation of netbooks and other products. With a second computational core the new Atom chip will not double the system's abilities, but it will probably boost overall performance of netbooks by about 50% and bring them to about the level of mainstream systems.
There are announced improvements about netbook graphics too. Nvidia has packaged its GeForce 9400M graphics accelerator (the same being used on Apple's new MacBook Pro notebooks) with Intel's Atom CPUs. The chip combo will take netbooks beyond Web browsing, e-mail and simple applications to handle complex graphics and high-definition video.
AMD is focusing on ultraportable computing with its Athlon Neo family of single and double-core processors. According to the company, Neo will be packaged with ATI Radeon Avivo video to make quick work of decoding and displaying HD video.
Via, the maker of the C7 processor that powers Hewlett-Packard Mini-Note 2133 netbook, is redesigning the C7 as a dual-core processor. Called the Via Nano, the processor will probably be available in early 2010 (a single-core version shipped earlier this year). Its design will likely have something that Intel and AMD are not offering in this class of processors: full hardware encryption of data for the security-conscious among us.
But this power increase will cut for sure into battery life. A more aggressive power management will be needed to compensate this increasing power consumption.
There is also an announced increase in using solid state drives for storage. It is predicted that by 2012 solid-state drives (SSD) could account for as much as 30% of the mobile storage market, with sales of about 10 million flash drives. Also an increase in SSD performance is announced, an equivalent of a 15,000 rpm hard drive performance in your notebook is to be expected.
There are also battery improvements on the way. New batteries with anode of pure carbon will last for more than 1,400 charge cycles, three to four times what conventional batteries are capable of now. This translates into four years of daily recharges. In addition, a new charging pattern was developed where a battery can be charged to 40% of its capacity in 10 minutes and 80% in 30 minutes. There is also fuel cell technology to consider but, in my opinion, this scenario is still far from getting real in the next couple of years.
I think that this is only a taste of what is to come in the near future. But one thing is for sure a better performance is expected from netbooks and more acceptable price tags for laptop computers and notebooks, suited to the present economical environment are needed for this industry to survive.