Fedja Kecman is marketing manager for tablet and notebook computers at 3M’s Display Materials and Systems group. Lower growth in mobiles and tablets mean that there will be more competitive pressure on the industry. As the session was about profit, just driving cost is not the only way. Innovation is important and performance will need to be improved.
Kecman highlighted battery life as a key point. He quoted James Kendrick of ZDNet as saying that a notebook should last eight hours to be useful, these days. Just adding batteries impacts weight and mass, so other approaches need to be tried. Intel has improved its CPUs, but displays have not changed so much. Higher resolution and performance may even make power consumption worse.
He then went through the different films that 3M supplies, including reflective polarisers, BEFs and bottom reflectors. You can boost brightness as well as reducing thickness and weight at the same time.
The improvements can be used to enhance different aspects of the system, by boosting battery life or reducing battery life, size and weight, although Kecman said that colour is the “low hanging fruit”.
