In Japan, cell phones are more than just phones: They're extensions of their owners. They function as a phone, a portable TV, a fashion item, a subway pass and a debit/credit card --- just like contactless credit cards that can be swiped across a sensor inside of swiped through a credit card reader. This idea is now being considered for American and European markets; there's a lot of back-end engineering that must be addressed, such as secure wireless transactions and high-speed servers.
Solid-state hard drives use memory chips, like in RAM, instead of magnetic disks like in a regular hard drive. In addition to being more reliable due to a lack of moving parts, solid-state drives also use less energy, as there are no parts to move --- just electrons. Solid-state drives also reduce the energy use of the entire electronic device by generating less heat and needing less energy for cooling the device.
Laptops are starting to roll out with internal cell-phone cards and antennas. However, these require careful engineering depending upon the network --- GSM, CDMA, 3G, 4G or satellite --- because data transmission puts more stress on the connection than voice transmission. Care must also be taken to account for the greater power drain that cellular antennas place upon the device, especially satellite antennas.
The universal serial bus, or USB, has proved to be a useful connection for myriad devices and platforms. USB version 1.0 had a speed of 1.5Mbps; version 1.1 had a speed of 12Mbs, and version 2.0 has a speed of 480Mbs. USB version 3.0 is being developed and could have a speed measured in the Gbs range; a wireless USB version is meant to take on Bluetooth as a personal area Wi-Fi standard.