The major manufacturers are now marketing laptops equipped with CPUs that run at 450Mhz and upwards. The problem with laptops is battery life. The chips not only consume a lot of energy doing their work, they also require a lot of energy to drive the cooling fans that stop them from melting. Short battery life and excessive weight are the downside of laptops until later this year. For the last five years Transmeta in the US has been working on a CPU that runs at high speed and uses a fraction of the energy required by the latest conventional architecture 1Ghz chips.
Manufacturers expect the first of the next generation laptops to be available in the summer.
These screens will come in many sizes, as paperbacks do, and may eventually be as cheap. They will be light, thin and run for many hours on smaller batteries. The screen will be viewable as a book or, turned through 90 degrees, as a monitor. If a keyboard is needed to write a document it will displayed on the screen and activated by touch. So will any controls.