40-Hour Laptop in Pipeline

Remember the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project? As you may recall the idea was to develop a laptop, costing less than $100, which would be given away to children in undeveloped countries. One unexpected spin-offs was the creation of a consumer market for compact low-cost mini laptops, or ‘netbooks’ typified by the Asus Eee PC and Acer Aspire One.

One of the brains behind OLPC was Mary Lou Jepsen (pictured right) who is the former head of display technologies at Intel, and she was responsible for the OLPC’s super low power, sunlight readable display. Now she has a new startup company, called Pixel Qi, with plans to start shipping a highly efficient screen, similar to the one in the OLPC, but for more conventional laptops. The backlight in an LCD screen is the biggest drain on a laptop battery and Jepsen predicts that the new screen could increase battery life by between five and ten times. That means that the new display, coupled with the latest low-power CPUs and long lasting Li Ion batteries, we could be talking about running times between 20 and 40 hours per charge. Now all you need are a couple of matches, to prop your eyelids open…