Max parks his hoverbike in front of his housing pod's acrylic dome; the artificial-intelligence sentry scans his retinas, then waves him inside. After switching on the hologram player, Max unloads his laptop, a US$200 tablet that weighs half a kilogram, contains no moving parts and can be dropped without damage. Its batteries are half depleted -- only 350 hours of power left. He points the machine at his home computer and presses the send button; the words he wrote on the road are silently beamed to the desktop machine, where they appear as though being typed by a secretary high on caffeine.
Of course, all of this is sci-fi nonsense -- except the part about the laptop.
The world is filled with fragile 3kg US$3,000 laptop computers with two-hour batteries.
But not all laptop makers prize megahertz, screen resolution and memory above all other specs. A few tiny companies, turning those priorities inside out, are making portables of a completely different sort: cheap, simple, rugged, light, amazingly power-stingy word processors.
Now, these aren't traditional laptops by any stretch; they're more like glorified keyboards. In fact, you can use most of them as keyboards when you're not on the road.
Monochrome readout
Instead of a screen, you get a monochrome LCD readout that shows only four or eight lines of text at a time. It's not even backlighted; too bad for people struck by inspiration in the middle of the night. There is no trackpad (only cursor keys), no modem or expansion slots and only enough memory to hold about 100 pages of typing.
As for multimedia, you're lucky if the word even exists in the built-in spelling checker.
Still, for every person who uses a laptop for animated PowerPoint shows in meetings, there's another who doesn't do much more than type. Students, of course, are far and away the biggest consumers of these portable note-takers; for the price of a single real laptop, a school board can buy 10 of these smart keyboards.
Smart keyboards start up and shut off instantly, are apparently crash-proof, save your work automatically and preserve your files when the batteries are removed. Because there is no hard drive or other moving parts inside, these machines withstand youthful handling that would shatter a real laptop -- and its owner.
When compared with the Palm-and-folding-keyboard setup that is increasingly popular among journalists, writers and researchers, a smart keyboard offers considerable savings, more rugged construction, greater typing comfort and dramatically improved battery life. And beaming the resulting plain-text files to a Macintosh or PC by infrared or cable is simpler than a Palm synchronization; the smart keyboard pours your text directly into whatever document is on your computer's screen (Word, Note Pad, an e-mail program, whatever).
International frequent flyers, too, are discovering these products; one set of AA batteries could take you around the world for 80 days. One smart-keyboard owner told me how, on a transoceanic flight, a desperate seatmate with a dead ThinkPad battery offered to buy her smart keyboard on the spot for several times its price.
The best-known smart keyboard is the AlphaSmart 3000, a compact two-pound US$230 device created by a pair of former Apple engineers.
Sculptured curves
Its Macintosh heritage is obvious; its translucent dark blue sculptured curves make it look like an iMac's house pet.
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