Some, such as Micron Technology CEO Steve Appleton, have predicted that notebooks containing flash memory, rather than hard drives, to store data and applications will come out in a few years
Actually, it will happen next year, according to Noam Kedem, vice president of marketing at MSystems, a flash company that recently got bought by SanDisk.
"Next year you will see some of these in enterprise verticals," he said. Substituting flash for a hard drive cuts weight and power consumption. However, flash costs more, so the overall market is a bit circumscribed, he conceded. It will be a bit before consumers start buying these.
Intel, meanwhile, has designed a flash notebook for developing nations, but the market parameters are different here too. The main concern is that a hard drive has a motor, which can break down when exposed to lots of dust, a common problem in villages in countries like Mali or Chad. The Intel notebooks will also only contain a small amount of internal memory.