Among the various prototypes proposed is a mobile phone soft as a sponge which can also go into the washing machine. Progress is continuing in the data storage capacity sector. Seagate has announced a new disk with a capacity of 180 Gbyte, enough to memorise 180,000 books of 1000 pages each. Siemens has announced trials in Germany of a mobile phone for children. This not only makes it easy to communicate with prerecorded numbers, but it also connects automatically every fifteen minutes to a centre to which it supplies its position.
Parents can call a call centre to learn the position of their child s mobile.
If the experiment is successful, the first commercial services should be available in spring 2001 in Germany and Britain. The semiconductor industry is pushing increasingly into the nanotechnology field. A meeting in San Francisco discussed progress and where it is leading. These types of chips should make real-time translation from one language to another feasible as well as recognition of people s facial expressions. Just think that such a PC carried out 2 million operations in the time it takes a bullet to travel 3 cm.