Within the near future, a new development in Lithium-Ion batteries could improve battery life for laptops, or it could create a situation where batteries are smaller. The researchers are talking about a 30% increase in energy, not to mention safer, and longer-lasting.
When you look at Intel’s efforts to reduce power consumption (and to be fair, AMD and VIA), as well as the increase in backlit-LED displays, in theory, laptop/notebook and UMPC manufacturers could go one of two ways: Devices similar to some of the designs we now see, but with a 30% (or more depending on CPU/chipset) increase in battery life. Alternatively, they could design devices quite a bit smaller or thinner, but with the same battery life we see these days (say reduce the battery size by 30%.