Horb A., Mudrenko А. А.

Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University

LIFEBOOK

The unique concept, dubbed "Lifebook 2013," comes from designer Prashant Chandra, who submitted the design to a competition held by Fujitsu.

Lifebook is an idea that integrates a tablet, a camera, a mobile phone and a music player. They all collectively form the hardware for a laptop. Each device works independently to support its unique identity and all of them are unified into a magic gadget.

Our life in this IT age typically consists of some digital devices that we use everyday to do our work, entertain ourselves, enjoy our hobbies, save our memories, share information and news, socialize with our family and friends, etc. Presently we buy each of these devices separately and then struggle to keep them all synchronized with our data. As a rule, we always use these devices one at a time and as a result we have a lot of wasted and idle hardware. If there was a gadget that could have all these devices integrated into one, we would buy only one gadget instead of four and in this way we would spend much less money and thereby synchronization would become a single process.

"The proposed Lifebook is a laptop computer concept based on the principle of 'shared' hardware," explains Chandra. "Currently a lot of hardware is wasted when we use separate devices, as there is often a lot of 'repeat' of data stored and features. For example if I have my songs on my music player, why do I have to block the same amount of storage on my laptop? Similarly, if I have a processor sitting in my tablet, why can it not also run/assist my laptop? If I have a fully functional camera with its own memory and image processing power, why do I need to have it repeated in my laptop?"

The idea is to reduce repetitive applications and functions by having all these separate gadgets operate sufficiently on their own and integrate them into a collective form of a laptop.

The laptop does not have a keypad of its own and instead of it there is a slot with a 16-pin connector linked to a tablet interface. As soon as the tablet is docked into the slot, a sensor senses the operation and the tablet itself becomes a full size touch-based QWERTY keyboard. Also as soon as the tablet is plugged in, it starts sharing its hardware and data to a laptop and it can even contribute towards improving the performance of a laptop or, in some cases, even to run a few functions of a laptop completely on its own. The tablet can also be used as a second display (like a larger Nintendo DS) or as a digital sketchpad with a stylus. In a similar way, a mobile phone+music-player is also completely integrated inside the laptop and through a connector it starts sharing hardware and data as soon as it is plugged in. The processor in the tablet runs the laptop, the mp3 player stores music, and the camera handles images.

 Additional advantages of such a concept include: single point changing for all devices, low chances of injury as a keypad is not mechanical, no wires are required to sync devices with each other, single point update of all device software, a double display if required by switching a keypad to a tablet mode while on a laptop. The laptop could also be used in a sketch mode with a stylus.

Lifebook is a logical step forward for the next generation of laptops and technology.