Vista Tech at Its Best
Peek inside your unbooted laptop.John Ribeiro
An "always-on" display technology from a company called PortalPlayer lets users peek inside their notebooks without booting them up. It's a potentially significant capability based on a new feature in Windows Vista called SideShow. Now it's just a matter of notebook makers spending $30 to $40 per notebook to add the feature, according to the company's president and CEO.
PortalPlayer announced its Preface display technology in January. It can go into laptop lids as an always-on interface that lets users load applications and access information on their laptops without having to open and boot them up, thus saving battery life, the company says. It can do this because Preface has its own operating software, processor, and memory cache, as well as application programming interfaces into Microsoft's Windows operating system. It caches information from the machine in its memory and can then access that data using less power than it would take to start the notebook.
PortalPlayer expects notebooks with Preface to start shipping in the second half of this year. The technology will initially go into high-end notebook computers.
Gary Johnson, the company's CEO, says PortalPlayer hopes to bring down the bill of materials to less than $20 by 2008. And he's optimistic that by that time as many as half of the laptops shipped will use Preface technology. Microsoft and PortalPlayer have demonstrated the technology on prototypes from Quanta Computer and Asustek Computer.
Cutting Costs
PortalPlayer kept down the costs of Preface by using a display used in mobile phones rather than developing one specially. The costs will include $18 to $20 for a display, about $12 for the single-chip processor, and a few dollars for memory and other small components, he says.
Preface uses a secondary notebook subsystem that includes a low-power processor, a display, and user controls that can be installed in various locations, including the outside of the notebook cover. "Except for periodically interrogating the notebook and bringing up the data, it is a stand-alone subsystem," apart from the power it draws from the notebook battery, Johnson says.
Preface is built around the SideShow feature of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, which is scheduled for release later this year. PortalPlayer also has a Windows XP version of Preface, but that version requires the computer to boot up temporarily to access the content.
John Ribeiro writes for IDG News Service.