Notebooks with flash and no drives coming to some next year

Some, such as Micron Technology CEO Steve Appleton, have predicted that notebooks containing flash memory, rather than hard drives, to store data and applications will come out in a few years

Actually, it will happen next year, according to Noam Kedem, vice president of marketing at MSystems, a flash company that recently got bought by SanDisk.

"Next year you will see some of these in enterprise verticals," he said. Substituting flash for a hard drive cuts weight and power consumption. However, flash costs more, so the overall market is a bit circumscribed, he conceded. It will be a bit before consumers start buying these.

Intel, meanwhile, has designed a flash notebook for developing nations, but the market parameters are different here too. The main concern is that a hard drive has a motor, which can break down when exposed to lots of dust, a common problem in villages in countries like Mali or Chad. The Intel notebooks will also only contain a small amount of internal memory.