AlphaSmart Shows Palm-Based Laptop

"krswan writes: "AlphaSmart, which has built proprietary 'mini-laptops' for education in the past, has released a Palm Compatible device with a full keyboard, built in rechargeable batteries, 2 USB ports, and two Secure Digital and Multimedia Card compatible slots - all for $399. It is only about 2 lbs and the screen resolution is 560X160. As a teacher, I would love 30 or so for my classroom. More details at the Dana website." It's basically still more a glorified keyboard (like the older AlphaSmart products) than a laptop, but that's not a bad thing." [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Philips Shrinks CD to 1.2 Inches

"In the ongoing effort to squeeze the size of a CD drive to fit into small, portable devices, Koninklijke Philips Electronics reports it is using blue laser technology to miniaturize a drive for an optical disc measuring 1.2 inches in diameter and capable of storing a gigabyte of data.

The company demonstrated Tuesday what it claims is the world's first fully functional prototype optical drive to measure only 2.24 by 1.36 by .3 inches. It can replay audio data on a 1.2-inch optical disc, according to Philips.

The disc's data capacity is 50 percent greater than that of current CD-ROMs, said Koen Joosse, a Philips spokesperson. It was made possible using a blue laser, which has a shorter wavelength than the red lasers used in current optical disc technology. A shorter wavelength means the laser beam can create smaller dots on optical discs, which means more data can fit on a disc....

optical drives are still costly to install in handheld devices, Schlichting said. The optical drives, which must be larger than the discs themselves, are larger and less convenient to use than flash memory cards. And because optical discs rotate, they consume more power than flash media, he added.

'The technology is still at an early stage, and we cannot determine when this will be commercialized,' Philips' Joosse said. The company hopes to shrink the .3-inch height of the drive; the optical disc's 1.2-inch diameter is already small enough for mobile devices, he said." [PC World]

Wow - 1GB on 1.2 inch re-writable CD! Of course, I still think you're going to want wireless access to the majority of your data and content (and you won't have much of a choice if The Heavenly Jukebox comes to pass), but that's a pretty handy number to have for storage. With MP4 video, could you watch (project?) a movie using a mobile device? That's a heck of a lot of ebooks....

Business Card-sized CD-R Media 100pk for $40

"Wanna burn a bunch of business-card discs? $40 gets you 100 CD-biz-card blanks, each holding 50MB. You could hand out copies of Seth Schoen's Bootable Business Card Linux, a substantial fraction of Project Gutenberg, you name it. I'm told that you can burn these with any tray-loading burner." [Boing Boing]

It would be interesting to make library cards out of these discs and give them to legislators. I'll have to think out what should be on the CD, but an index page that points to library services, interesting statistics, remote database access, and maybe some patron testimonials (video, Flash,?) could be a good start.