After having been talked about on the internet and among 'techies' for quite some time (a year or more) major manufacturers are finally looking at flash memory based drives as an alternative to traditional platter-and-magnet hard drives. Dell
announced that they are introducing a solid-state flash drive as a $550 (!!) option on their Latitude D420 and D620 notebooks.
According to Dell's statistics, it offers up to 23% increase in performance, and can take more punishment than the notebook case itself can take. Personally I'm interested in battery consumption numbers, and if this really makes as huge a difference as it's been theorised. Batteries still end up being the bottleneck on computer hardware improvements - there hasn't really been a huge jump in battery capacity in years, just in lowering the consumption of the components, so every little bit does help.
This makes Dell the second manufacturer, behind Sony, to do this, and the first to offer it in North America (and South America). For once Dell's ahead of the curve, instead of imitating the curve! (Laugh, it's a joke - I use a Dell laptop.)
Certainly this is a little less common a news item than things about the ebook readers (nice, but expensive! - ok, this is expensive too...), but it's important to remember some of us still use laptops.
[Found via
Slashdot.]