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Security 2.0
Anti-virus vendors are scrambling to keep up with the explosion of malware.
Many users have remained blissfully ignorant of the potential security risks while typing in credit card info and other sensitive data when making online purchases on established websites. But the general public has begun to wake up to the threats they face, while anti-malware firms are sounding the alarm.
Just this month, TJX Companies, which has retail outlets in the United States and in the UK, disclosed that black hack hackers stole over 47.5 million credit car numbers of customers since 2005. Last November, the UK’s HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) said it lost detailed personal information, including addresses and national insurance numbers of 25-millon people, which was stored on two CDs that were lost in the mail.
But besides the threat of data loss by inept third-party vendors and government agencies, malware attacks that directly target individual PCs are exploding. Anti-malware vendor F-Secure {{http://www.f-secure.com}}, said its malware detections skyrocketed from a quarter-million at the beginning of last year to half a million at the end of 2007.
While we are far from a Security 2.0 scenario, anti-malware firms are forced to offer more aggressive security services. F-Secure, for example, offers root kit detection and removal in addition to what it claims is “real-time” protection against virus and spyware. Antimalware vendors this year should begin to offer full suites of data-protection offerings, such as encryption services, instead of plain vanilla virus and spyware protection.
Really Green Computing
Laptop OEMs are beginning to offer more laptop recycling and power savings options.
 OEMs have paid lip service to their role in the “green computing” movement for years, but consumers could finally see laptops with noticeable environmental benefits in 2008. Last year, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, the World Wildlife Fund and others announced the formation of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative with the goal of saving $5.5 billion in annual energy costs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 54 million tons per year through the development of what they say will be highly efficient power supplies.
If the OEMs do what they have pledged to do, look out for laptops that will not only indirectly reduce greenhouse emissions by consuming less power, but also offer savings on your electricity bill.
There will also be a shift in how electronics are recycled. After the European Union Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive took effect in the UK last year, suppliers and OEMs will increasingly shoulder more responsibilities for laptop and other electronics device disposals.
Terabyte Laptops
The Asus M70 laptop combines two Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 500Mb drives.
 Asus launched the world’s first commercially available terabyte laptop earlier this month, while other OEMs will soon follow Asus’ lead. Asus’ M70 fits two Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 500Mb drives inside the PC. As early as next year, Hitachi could supply laptops with single 1Tb hard drives.
Besides a new read-head that accounted for the capacity boost, the Travelstar 5K500 features Hitachi’s Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology, which the firm said overcomes the instability of mechanical hard drives by detecting possible vibrations to stabilize the drive head before damage occurs. RVS can thus prevent damage multi-media laptops might cause when sound from high-powered speakers creates vibrations,
Solid State Drives as Standard
SSD drives are fast, robust, and quiet –but are likely to be prohibitively expensive in the near term
 Solid state drives (SSDs) offer clear advantages compared to traditional mainstream disks with better read and write times, faster data access speeds, and lower power consumption. Since they do away with the mechanical parts of hard drives, SSDs are less-prone to failure and enable laptops to run that much quieter. So for users seeking the best high-end laptops commercially available, SSDs should be on the component list.
Unfortunately, the technology comes at a very steep price, which will impede its adoption this year. Opting for the media in a laptop can add £500 to the sticker price, while the per-gigabyte cost for SSDs can be over 50 times that of traditional drives and. Still, prices are rapidly falling.
The media’s high cost did not prevent Asus from launching its very mobile yet cheap Eee PC (although there is only a very meagre 1.2Gb of free space on the 4Gb SSD drive). The jury also remains out for the 2Gb variant Asus launched earlier this month. High-end gaming OEM Alienware, a Dell subsidiary, and Toshiba offer SSD laptops as well. Intel’s upcoming Menlow platform will also accommodate SSD drives.
OLED Screens
OLED panels show more promise, but remain extremely pricey.
 After LG introduced a PC with an OLED screen some time ago, how long will it be before OEMs even think about replacing LCDs with OLED screens in their laptops? That day is still probably a long way off.
Yet, Sony showed just how promising OLED panels are at the Consumer Electronics Show, when it debuted its XEL-1 TV. Commercially available in the United States, Sony’s 11-inches XEL-1 offers a stunning 1,000,000:1 contrast, which would be a welcome replacement to what LED backlights offer?
OLED also got another dose of good news recently when Corning announced the development of its Jade glass that helps to overcome OLED displays’ polysilicon backplane performance problems and sensitivity to moisture and oxygen.
Yet, pricing remains a major hurdle, preventing the display type’s wide-scale adoption. The XEL-1’s U.S. price of $2,500 for a mere 11-inch display, for example, shows how far OLED prices must drop before they enter the affordable laptop price category anytime soon.
Multi-Core Laptops
Intel will launch its first quad-core platform for laptops during the second half of the year.
 Intel will later this year bring its quad-core CPUs to market for laptops, while there is rampant speculation about when Intel and AMD will pack 16-core CPUs for mobile applications. On the record, Intel only says it will offer the quad-core laptop platform during the second half of the year, while it has not yet disclosed the brand name for the devices. The chip giant will also undoubtedly hope to build on what was probably its most successful ever Core 2 Duo platform, the performance of which has won over the most die-hard AMD fans.
Intel will not comment about future plans or beyond, of course, what it recently disclosed at IDF. However, Intel’s upcoming Nehalem architecture will reportedly host up to eight cores. How many cores Intel will pack in its 32nm, 1.9 billion transistor Westmere platform when it is launched next year also remains unknown.
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