Ink and incremental change as Apple continues to fall | Bangkok Post: opinion

CURRENTS

This year will be an interesting one and a little like 1998 because the world marketplace will be struggling, there will be little disposable income to go around, sales figures will be down and as a consequence there will not be a strong push to move computer technology very far. In the smartphone arena I predict that the Samsung Galaxy S4 will eclipse the iPhone 5S for two reasons. The 5S will be a catch-up model to the S3 with nothing special about it and at the same time the S4 will be well ahead of the 5S in functionality. Up until the iPhone 4, Apple dominated the market. With the release of the 4S and the passing of Steve Jobs things started to go downhill as Apple started to become reactive to the marketplace instead of a market driver. It moved to litigation and protectionism over inventiveness and innovation. So the downward slide of Apple will continue through 2013.

With the hard disk manufacturing back on track we will finally see some larger hard drives this year, with 4TB drives to become common. But I'm not convinced we will see anything much bigger than that, though we are due for something around the 6TB capacity. Thumb drives will definitely get bigger and the 1TB model should be available this year. SD cards will also increase in size to double what we had last year, pushed by the larger megapixel cameras that seem to be getting less expensive.

On digital cameras I'm not sure where they will go this year but expect to see more models with smartphone-like capability built in, perhaps without an actual phone but rather with Android based touch screen functionality. There is really no need to go much higher in resolution since 16 megapixels and 20x zoom in a point and shoot is more than anyone really needs. Instead expect incremental improvements in low light processing and an attempt to bring in a better starting point at the wide angle range.