McKinney spoke at the Connections conference in Santa Clara, and a former colleague of mine, Rick Merritt, covered the keynote and posted a video interview here.

In it, McKinney goes into some of the challenges he faces, as well as a discussion of the Innovations program, a think tank that oversees the launch of some, well, innovative products, such as the HP Blackbird gaming PC. McKinney's speech went into his vision of twenty years into the future, such as rings that essentially provided a saved state of data, preferences, and other components. And yes, there are thinking machines.

One small portion of the interview concerned the challenges McKinney himself faces when designing the next generation of devices. I've transcribed this portion after the jump.

The technologies that I think are the biggest challenges for us and we are actually looking for partners and people with great ideas. One would be battery technologies. Battery technologies continue to be the challenge. I get Moore's law marching along, but I'm only getting 10 percent improvement in battery densities every year. So batteries are a key challenge for us.

The other is in the wireless space. One area is -- at least my personal observation is -- where there is not enough R&D going in is in the smart antennas.

So if you think about an HP notebook that has both Wi-Fi and 3G technologies in it, I'm mounting all those antennas behind the LCD display. I have to map 5, 7, 9 different antenna packages into that display and as I put more and more radios into those technologies as I try to get to this ubiquitous network experience, this always connected model, I need more and more antennas in there so that the device can be seamless across all those access.

And what's really lacking, what we haven't been able to find, is some really great breakthrough research that's occurring in kind of that of next generation of smart antennas that allow us to take all these different access needs and get that package down to a smaller size.