Mobile computer market is one of the fastest growing markets in the IT industry, but although all notebook manufacturers report of steady increases of the mobile PC sales, the overall number of sold products is still relatively small. Mostly, this is due to fairly high cost of notebooks, short battery time as well as lack of certain features consumers would like to see. These and other issues are going to be addressed by Microsoft's next-generation Longhorn operating system, the company says. Microsoft hopes that with the release of the upcoming OS the mobile PCs will be as indispensable as cell phones today are.

?Unfortunately there are good reasons 700 million cell phones were sold last year, compared with about 50 million laptops. Portable computers are too bulky, too slow and too quick to run out of juice. Customers are not really getting the value out of mobile PCs that they find in mobile phones,?said Bill Mitchell, head of the Microsoft's mobile PC efforts,

?Microsoft plans to address some of these shortcomings in Longhorn, the new version of Windows that's scheduled for release next year. To address the power issue, Microsoft is pushing laptop makers to add features such as flash memory-equipped drives, reducing the number of times a computer must spin a power-hungry hard drive. Other planned changes include the addition of a ?mobility center?that will serve as a single control panel for all manner of laptop-related settings. The concept is similar to the Security Center Microsoft added to Windows XP with Service Pack 2,?writes CNET News.com.

• CNET News.com: Can Longhorn Improve Laptops?