HP has been pioneering different parts of computing since the desktop era, and has been working in the smartphone realm since their misbegotten escapades with Palm back in 2010. They’ve made the Slate line of tablets, none of which were too unique, interesting or special, HP has plans in place to change data in a big way, and the project is called “The Machine”.
The Machine is the project name whose aim is to change, revolutionize, and drastically improve the way that we, not just businesses, not just consumers, are able to store and access data online through the cloud, and locally on our devices themselves. The local side of things is what is important to us Android users, though.
The physical and local aspects of The Machine are astounding in what they aim to do, both for storage and accessibility of it. The old PC professional HP is working on developing a technology called ‘memristors’, which use lasers instead of wire to carry signal, increasing speed and decreasing size of actual transport paths to 25% of what they are. They are also working on utilizing photon technologies to unify RAM and ROM for devices. That would mean that your phone or tablet’s motherboard would have smaller and faster circuits and would be able to have more storage in the same, or even less space, all while, as HP describes, costing less and being more power-efficient.
The first institution of these technologies will be data servers, to allow for reducing the physical size or the huge rooms full of data storing server machines, into something the size of a washing machine and drier. The technology which could, according to HP’s forecasts, cut electrical consumption by 80%, decrease costs by 70%, reduce physical size by 80%, and make them 97% less complex. What could all of HP’s new technology-in-the-works do for those of us on Android?
For fun, let’s say this technology developed and became available to all manufacturers, as HP hopes it will, and gets put into an Android smartphone. The phone itself could be thinner than the Samsung Galaxy S5, weigh less than the Apple iPod Touch, have all the top-tier specifications you want to add in for the sake of numbers, and have 100TB (that’s terabyte, and one of those is 1024 gigabytes (GB), by the way) of internal storage, and be able to access and otherwise work with your data faster than possible today with today’s technologies. Keep an eye on HP and The Machine, and to read more in-depth about the whole concept, not just for Android, check out Business Week’s story on it.