Tech Innovations You Haven't Heard of Yet

I have spent the past month or so testing a Lenovo ThinkPad (starting at $1,825), which is an early solid-state drive computer.

The ThinkPad is a small-business workhorse. The shape and design was originally created by IBM back in the day: no-nonsense flat black; a 13-inch screen; nearly full-size keyboard; basic touch-pad; and center mouse controller. It has enough expansion slots, USB connectors and other modules to connect, dock and transmit whatever you need to connect, dock and transmit.

It is clear what a step forward a solid-state drive is for this machine. First, this ThinkPad is blissfully light. ThinkPads are notorious back-killing beasts that can weigh close to 10 pounds with accessories. My test machine, by contrast, with cords and everything, was well under 3 pounds. And there is no performance hit. The unit is a fully powered two-core, 1.2 Ghz processor with 2 GB of RAM, perfectly capable of running most applications in Windows XP.

And this ThinkPad is definitely more durable: The solid-state drive was quiet, and I was less worried doing the road warrior thing as I dragged the laptop through airports, conference centers and hotel rooms. But true to form, the major ding here is battery life. I was lucky to get two hours of usage out of the machine, even in full battery-save mode.

My verdict? SSD laptops are probably too pricey and finicky for the average small-business user. Nearly $2,000 for a ThinkPad with only a few hours of battery life is probably too far to go for most. But, clearly, these issues are just bumps in the road. Give SSDs some time, and costs will drop and battery life will jump -- as new technologies like the batteries from Toshiba come on line.