Blu-ray lasers have just gotten smaller and far more efficient, now able to burn Blu-ray content at a much faster 6x write speed.

This is a great improvement for Blu-ray in portable devices and could lead to thinner laptops where the laser won’t be the limiting factor in size.

We can’t wait until these new revisions are in laptops, and better yet, until the technology gets smaller and more efficient once again and we can burn at 12x or even higher.

Maybe some day the MacBook Air will be able to squeeze one of these in.

Starting mid-February, business customers will be able to order HP’s Compaq dc7800 ultra-slim PC with an SSD drive. We aren’t sure what the drive size will be, but 32GB seems to be a good estimate seeing as the price increase is about $500.

This is the beginning of putting SSDs in our computers, with more and more expected to start showing up soon. Hopefully 2008 will turn out to be the year of the solid state disk, as we can’t wait to put these puppies in our laptops.

It seems that Sony has just about put a nail in Toshiba’s HD DVD coffin with their latest announcement. The tech giant has been able to shrink the Blu-ray module to a more compact size, meaning that Blu-ray drives will be getting smaller and, more importantly, cheaper.

The new laser unit is a measly 3mm thick. Sony thinks that the device will make it to 9.5mm laptop drives by the end of the year.

A few more features of the new laser - it can handle dual-layer discs as well as those with organic dye in the recording layers. This is good news as organic discs can be made on current DVD production lines, which probably means cheaper prices.

It’s a good thing that the format war is finally winding down. Both formats are great, and have their separate strengths, but it’s good to finally know which player to buy.

Joel Levin has written a great article about what he thinks will be the 10 prominent features in our next generation laptops. Included are a 40 hour battery, USB 3.0, Blu-ray drive, SSD, and new kinds of memory, among others.

I’m looking forward to seeing a laptop with all of these features released. I’m guessing it will be instant-on, with a great looking screen, and it will be screaming with power, from the processor down to the hard drive.

That’s right - PCs will soon have the same capabilities as the new MacBook Air when it comes to the trackpad, thanks to Synaptic. They recently announced a new touchpad with support for various gestures including scrolling, zooming, and trackball-like movement. Mark Vena, vice president of Synaptics’ PC business unit, said that we can expect these to hit computers in late March or early April.

My take? Although the technology definitely has the “cool” factor and I would order one on a new laptop, I don’t think this will increase productivity all that much. Scrolling is one of the most common tasks, and we have been able to do that with our touchpads for a long time now. How often do you find yourself zooming in on photos or rotating them? Synaptics is poised to allow you to do that faster, but I don’t mind clicking a button or two to do that now. I am hoping the company dreams up some new uses for this technology that will truly make it indispensable.
Photo: http://www.apple.com/macbookair/features.html