Environmentally neutral technology would require manufacturing processes that don’t require huge amounts of energy (produced with fossil fuels in China and elsewhere to boot!) and materials that don’t become problematic waste after the life cycle of the device. Energy use over their lifetime is important too, but we would benefit from environmentally friendly manufacturing and materials even more.

Take the time to educate yourself about the goals of the OLPC team, where they had to build an education focused netbook that would be able to run in an educational setting, in a jungle hut, miles from anywhere, …where there was NO ELECTRICITY AT ALL! They had to generate it maybe with a hand crank to power the system! Then you start to understand where this is all headed (then put these same systems on every desktop of the world and power them all from solar and wind power generation that is located on the roof of the business. Global warming and credits for carbon cap and trade, add up to money that will pay for the installations of these evolutionary and revolutionary IT systems.

When you check out the specs of the OLPC XO-1 it had several key power saving features: First – the motherboard shut down when the CPU was not needed to be used, Second – the Mesh Networking also shut down (saving power), Third- the screen had it’s power saving features too, Lastly, the system was not over powered, and was built lean and mean, low power wise with just enough system strength JUST to get job done (vs the over powering that is done with modern notebooks and desktops).

If you check out all the Mary Lou Jepsen video interviews at Big Think – you will get a picture that by just changing the screen, that you do not gain a huge advantage battery wise, you have to change the whole system, and your philosophy of system design too.
see: http://bigthink.com/maryloujepsen
The full list of videos is here:
http://bigthink.com/maryloujepsen/ideas

These videos show the most evolutionary thought in computer technology in 20 years.
Pixel Qi screens is just one step in the right direction.

The long term goal, since we are not giving up our computers any day soon, is to use almost no electricity while using them. Saving the planet along the way is a good thing.

http://pixelqi.com/blog1/2009/05/28/first-picture-of-pixel-qi-3qi-screen/

I like Sasha’s quote: “We will see more devices from Pegatron (…) Freescale should have a pretty cool lineup of ARM based netbooks. It’s all about connectivity, about highly integrated chipsets. We are talking about one little chip that integrates Wimax, bluetooth, GPS, 3G and whatever.. This is where all these ARM platforms can really get their big advantage out to the market. It means low power consumption, highly integrated chipsets, very slim designs at a very low price point. It will happen now in a week.”

ARM and Android will kill Intel and Microsoft starting this week.