Where is the ultra low power laptop?

I have a desktop machine at home that I can do my number-crunching things on. I don't want my laptop to do the same things (otherwise, I'd just buy a really big laptop that does it all but is heavy). I'd rather my laptop is as light-weight as possible and provides me with a very few basic amenities: Browsing the web, editing a file, transferring files, viewing pictures (since I have a digital camera). I don't need a huge harddrive. I don't need a monster graphics card. I don't need a CPU that can solve the halting problem in less than 42 seconds. Heck, I don't even necessarily want to run X on it. I basically want a glorified typewriter: Screen, keyboard, and what is necessary to make the two work together.

So if my needs are so simple, why does my laptop have to be big? One of the heavier parts of a laptop is the battery. The battery has to be large because it has to provide power to many things. But why do these things require so much power? Can we pare them down? Let's take a look.

• The screen. There are screens that take up virtually no power when the contents are not changing. Since I'm not going to play games or watch movies on this thing, let's use one of them. To be really extreme, let's see if we can get the electronic paper in place.
• The CD/DVD drive. Not required. All file transfer should go via memory cards.
• The harddrive. Either a very small one (1.8") or maybe even without one, using flash memory instead. Flash memory is dropping so much in price that 10GB is not that unrealistic, and it only seems to be getting cheaper.
• The CPU. Lowest-power CPU we can find.
• The graphics card. No 3D accelleration, as low power as possible.
• The keyboard. Must have a normal-size keyboard, as typing will be a main activity on it. Doesn't need keybad etc on the side, though a possibility would be detachable ones next to the mousepad.
• Connectors. As few as possible. Power, network, USB, and monitor should do it, the rest is just extra electronics taking up space and power.
• Memory. Would be willing to cut the amount to get lower-power versions.

Cutting these things should put the power requirements way lower than what we're currently seeing. We can either use that to extend the battery time or to reduce the battery size. I'm for reducing battery size -- as long as the laptop can stay on without charging for the whole day, I'm pretty much happy.

A side usage of this laptop would be for storing pictures while on a photo shoot. However, if a decent-capacity harddisk is too heavy or too powerconsuming, an external USB-based one would do me fine.

Where can I get this thing? For that is the laptop I want to buy.

Candidates

These are some of the things that come close:

Toshiba Tecra 8100: 5.5 pounds (3 kg), $333. Short battery life though. And why a DVD reader?

Averatec AV3270-EE1: 4.2 pounds (2.5 kg), $638+.

The correct word to use is "subnotebook". See Wikipedia for more info.

Sharp Actius PC-MM10: About $600, 2.1 pounds (1.3 kg), 2.7 hour battery. Extra 9 hours battery weighing another half-pound available. Looking better. Keyboard supposedly very small, though.

-- LarsClausen - 06 Apr 2006
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