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We’ve actually got the distributors for Samsung’s new solid state drives coming into the TrustedReviews offices for a chat in a couple of weeks, so it’ll be a great opportunity to have a chat and try to find out how close we are to this becoming a reality.

In fact Intel will have its work cut out if it wants to turn the UMPC into a device that’s anything like the one it demoed in one of those ‘technology of the future’ videos. In the reel, a guy in a suitably minimalist apartment was giving voice commands to a TV to push data that he wanted such as certain news reports or videos to his UMPC. He then got into his car and docked his UMPC, turning it into a GPS unit with 3D maps that not only showed the roads but also buildings and other landmarks – something I think gives the likes of TomTom something to aim at as currently the level of terrain detail in maps is very limited. He then spoke to the device to enter directions rather than touching it.

Of course the power and efficiency of all components such as CPU, screen, and radios would have to be several times greater than what they are today, though having listened to an in depth discussion of low power radio design at IDF I know that Intel is very much working on these things. It will need to if it wants to reach its aim of turning UMPCs into Mobile Internet Devices - ones that we’ll be able to take out and use all day, as we currently do with mobile phones, but with the power of full PCs.

One of the technologies that Intel talked up at IDF its Santa Rosa notebook platform. My favourite feature from this is ‘Robson’, or Intel Turbo memory as it’s now dubbed. This is NAND flash memory that sits between main memory and the hard disk and acts as a buffer speeding up application load times and boot times significantly. We actually have a couple of notebooks from some big name manufactures based on Intel’s new Santa Rosa platform in the labs right now and come Wednesday we’ll be able to tell you how much of a difference Turbo Memory has made. Hopefully lots, as I’m an impatient sort of fellow and anything that gets my applications loading faster the better. In fact, in the morning, the time it takes me to boot up, and load my apps such as Outlook and Photoshop on my aging PC is a real bind, though it does give me time to get my coffee and cereal together. What I’m wanting then is Turbo Memory on the desktop and not surprisingly that’s on Intel’s road map. It’s codenamed ‘Snowgrass’ and will enable motherboard manufacturers to put a module of memory down on the motherboard.

There’s a lot of cool stuff to look forward to then both in the next few days and in the next few years. By the end of the decade could faster and longer lasting solid state notebooks be the norm and will UMPCs that will actually have enough staying power so as to be useable making them more than tech flash gimmicks for the seriously overpaid.

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