CES 2006 – starts tomorrow Jan 6 – where is the Atom Chip 1TB RAM Laptop??!

CES is one of the largest consumer electronics shows, and it opens tomorrow in Las Vegas.

There is always a bunch of new gadgets that get announced by all the major vendors at the show, plus some additional surprises.

The big thing I’m looking for announcements on this year is anything from the company called ‘Atom Chip’, who earlier last year announced they would be appearing at a booth at the show to demonstrate their supercomputer of a laptop. They claim to have developed ‘Quantum-Optical non-volatile RAM’ which allows them to build a laptop with 1TB of RAM, and 2TB of non-volatile secondary storage. This is quite impressive if it is true, but was dismissed at the time it hit the news websites as a hoax. Well if they are at CES then hopefully we’ll find out whether this is for real or not – if it is real then it certainly sounds impressive.

Interesting to note – if you go out to their website and look at the specs of the ‘non volatile memory laptop’, the specs seem to have decreased slightly… now its 100GB RAM and 256GB storage – still impressive, none the less.

Google deny ‘Google PC’ rumours

Google have denied rumours that they are considering entering the hardware market with low cost consumer PCs.

Yesterdays comments on News.com seemed to originate from Robert X Cringely’s comments in his blog back in November, where he discussed a concept he calls ‘Google Cubes’ – small consumer PCs to integrate with every media device you can imagine and connect to your TV in your familiy room. It’s not clear from his blog whether this is speculation or based on fact, or just plain rumours.

Portable hard drives challenging Flash drives in terms of cost and size

Price per MB, portable hard drives are now cheaper than the Flash drives that are now more common than floppy disks. The NAND type of RAM in Flash cards currently sells for around $45 per GB, whereas portable harddrives are down to around $18 per GB.

Cornice will be demo’ing their latest line of portable harddrives at this year’s CSE show that are about the size of a pack of cards, and come in 8Gb and 10Gb sizes.