In the early 1990s, the rapid growth of mobile computing drove the development of smaller, lighter, and more portable tools for information processing. One of the most exciting of these innovations was PC Card technology. The power and … [Continue reading]
Many notebook PCs are proprietary designs, sharing few common, standard parts. A consequence of this is that their expansion potential is often limited and the cost of upgrading them high. Whilst most will use standard CPUs and RAM, these … [Continue reading]
Historically, the technology of the batteries that power notebook PCs has developed at a somewhat slower rate than other aspects of mobile computing technology. Furthermore, as batteries get better the power advantage is generally negated by … [Continue reading]
In the portable arena the dramatic weight, size and power consumption benefits of LCD technology has, for several years, outweighed their relative high cost. By the late 1990s notebook screen sizes had topped out at around 15in and two designs … [Continue reading]
High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a new mobile telephony protocol that provides a smooth evolutionary path for UMTS networks to higher data rates and higher capacities, in the same way as EDGE does … [Continue reading]
Although broadband has been available for some time, access for most people is still limited. At the end of 2002, it was estimated that only 46 million subscribers worldwide had broadband access, … [Continue reading]
In the early 2000s, the momentum gained by IEEE 802.11b in the wake of the surge in home networking so as to allow the sharing of broadband Internet connections saw the technology migrate from the home to outdoors. The WLAN configuration was the same … [Continue reading]
2001 was a tough year for the proposed 802.11g standard, with endless disagreements amongst the IEEE members over how it should be implemented and a real threat that it might be abandoned altogether. Towards … [Continue reading]
The 802.11b group within IEEE was driven largely by Lucent Technologies and Intersil Corp., and was designed to operate in the 2.4GHz ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) band. The key contribution … [Continue reading]
Galileo comprises a constellation of 30 satellites divided between three circular orbits at an altitude of around 24,000 km to cover the Earth's entire surface. They will be supported by a worldwide … [Continue reading]