By Chad Sapieha, Special to CBCNews.ca

LAS VEGAS - Among the requisite televisions, camcorders, and mobile handsets on display at Samsung's pavilion this year sat the Q1 Ultra, which won a Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Innovations Award.

The svelte little ultraportable PC has a surprisingly large and clear touch screen. It's been around for a while, but Samsung has tweaked the small QWERTY keyboard, which is split in two with one half on each side of the screen, by making the buttons larger and more comfortable. It's a powerful little sub-kilogram PC, sporting 1 gigabyte of RAM, a 1.3 GHz processor and an 80GB hard disk drive.

Even more impressive, though, was Samsung's showing of a Q1 Ultra adapted to work with a 64GB solid state drive. W ith their lightning quick data access speeds, lower battery consumption, and highly reliable performance, solid state drives might represent the future of storage for the personal computer industry. Problem is, they're rare, expensive, and come with smallish capacities at the moment.

However, Samsung also unveiled at CES this year the largest solid state drive yet made: 128GB. It's apparently ready to ship, though the company rep I spoke with didn't have a price or availability information.

(The author is a Toronto-based freelance writer)