The birth of the InfoWorld WorldBooks

What sort of laptop could PC makers create if they were willing to think outside the boring old box? To find out, we took to the drawing board ourselves

 

If you're looking for suit and tie justification for a discrete GPU, realize that accelerated 3-D graphics also means accelerated compositing and bitmap manipulation. If you're delivering a presentation to a large group using a high-resolution projector or, say, a huge plasma monitor, integrated graphics won't be able to fill that screen with layered and animated graphics, embedded video, and broadcast-grade slide transitions without stuttering. That takes a GPU.

Now go read the specs
Security, power, and multimedia are among the areas detailed in WorldBook's specifications and marketing materials that don't engender much controversy, and therefore require relatively little explanation, which fits since we're out of time anyhow.

WorldBook can replace a notebook, cell phone, PDA, cellular data card, digital media player, and desktop computer. Any notebook could do that. We just ignored the conventional wisdom that says it shouldn't be done. We're not planning to make phones, PDAs, and the rest, so unlike other contenders, we aren't worried about competing with our own products.

You might notice that WorldBook is also designed to be home theater-friendly. Out of the box, its HDMI and coaxial digital audio outputs jack straight into any modern HDTV and surround sound amplifier. It plays media from hard disk or SD cards, streams media from Internet and LAN sources, and acts as a streaming media server. If you add the DiscDock, you add DVD or Blu-ray playback. Add the USB HD tuner/capture box, and you have a high definition hard disk recorder that archives programs to DVD. You can add TiVo, DVD recorder, and AppleTV to the list of devices that WorldBook replaces.

A notebook should do all that it's capable of doing, without being limited by convention. It requires nerve and imagination, assets that, we admit, were in ample supply while we dreamed up this notebook that will never exist. We did our best to keep it real, and for all the details we covered, we found consensus on a great many issues. WorldBook will never be, but it could be. Somebody could build it a year from now. If you could buy a WorldBook, would you? And if you wouldn't buy it, what would you change that would make it irresistible? As much of a challenge as it is, look at the specs and the marketing materials as though the machine actually exists. Tell us what you think. After all, we built the WorldBook for you.

Tom Yager is chief technologist of the InfoWorld Test Center. He also writes InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve and Enterprise Mac blogs.