It’s solid!

I’m impressed. The day of the purely solid state consumer laptop is rapidly approaching:

Toshiba on Thursday announced another big step in the industry-wide adoption of solid state drives—the first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD. The drive will make its public debut at CES in January.
The company will also be debuting a number of different capacity SSD drives—64-, 128, and 256GB drives, available in either 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch form factors. The drives feature MLC controllers, read speeds of 240 Mbytes/s, and write speeds of 200 Mbytes/s.

I’m sure the price is going to be staggering—for a while. But in five to ten years, we’ll probably be looking back at mechanical drives and wondering how the heck we survived with spinning pieces of metal in our computers.

And while we’re at it, I’ll mention Truphone too. I haven’t given this a try yet—and to be sure, reviews on the net range from wildly positive to abysmal—but it’s surely a sign of things to come.