Although I was quite unsatisfied in "Tech tramples", I come with nice news for you who likes to customize your gadget, or simply point the direction in which we are going.
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Microcontrollers. Or just uC for the closest (u stands for the greek letter 'mu').
They are the key to the new revolution that's reached us. Of course uC have microProcessors, but they are much more than this. uP have huge processing power, but low intelligence. Although they are very versatile, they depend a lot on the interfaces available to them, provided by the boards in which they work.
But uC... they are a lot smaller, power saving and... tricky to work with, but worth the time. All sort of new devices are embedded with them and soon enough there will be no more room for our monster QuadCore(C) PC's. Smartphones are in the brink of reaching dual cored uC, which is a lot of horsepower for experient or smart engineers. Netbooks are going the same path, as well as notebooks, and we can now easily foresee that those huge PC powerplants will be left only for hardcore gamers and designers. (I consider myself a game addict, but moved to a well equipped HP Pavilion, leaving my desktop days behind...)
Here are some novel designs by Freescale, although I'm 3 months late, they are still surprising:
I have seen even more challenging designs, like parchment-rolls notebooks (google D-Roll), and notebooks thinner than MacBook Air, with touchscreen keyboard, instead of our actual mechanical ones... Things like laser projected keyboards AND screens are not a far reality now.
I guess that in 5 or less years, everyone will be working like Tom Cruise in Minority Report and will be joking at the bulky netbooks of 2009 ;)
