My crystal ball has booted up... | Bangkok Post: tech

COMPUTER Currents

We have entered the New Year and by some accounts with less than two years left, if the 2012 alarmists are right.

Ignoring all of that, however, it is time for me to dust of my crystal ball and guess what is likely to happen this year in IT and related fields.

The introduction of the Apple eBook in a few months will kick off a greater interested in digital reading. To that end I expect to see more publishers release digital book versions some months after the hardback release. This will be done primarily to protect hardback sales.

Digital stills and video cameras will continue to merge this year, with more high-end SLR makers adding video capture support. At the same time I also expect to see low light sensitivity capability move into the compact arena, perhaps not to the level of the 100K ASA we see in some current high end models but certainly up to the 6400 ASA range.

We will see a 4 TB hard drive this year and perhaps larger. Thumb drives will reach 1TB and even 2TB this year but the sweet spot will be around 128GB by year's end. Other flash memory will come down in price and that same amount will be the common sizes as well.

Monitors will settle in at about 26 inches as the common size, with the teens being left behind as an available monitor size. OLED will still not move much this year and instead something else will come in to replace it.

At least one of the big names in electronics will bring out a decent media player this year, breaking the drought for consumers. I predict that this will not be Sony but someone like Samsung or Pioneer. The Blu-ray will continue to occupy a small part of the DVD marketplace and will not pass 15 percent market penetration this year.

As far as the rest of the usual suspects are concerned, CPUs will continue to add cores and 6-8 core units will become more common. At the same time there will be a move to integrate other functionality on the same chip like video processing. Four gigabytes of Ram will become the common standard for the PC, with about the same amount for notebooks as well.

I see no real movement for scanners, printers or modems. It will always come done to the consumables for the printers and the other two technologies have not changed much lately either. There may be some new wireless standards to implement, but not much else.

USBV 3.0 will however take hold this year, with all-new motherboards supporting the technology and a plethora of peripherals appearing. They will not be all that fast at the start of the year but by year end they should be using close to the max capability of the standard.

When it comes to software, I expect Windows 7 to be much more successful than Vista ever was. I predict that I may even have installed it by year's end but that I'll also still have an XP Pro machine.

As for the other software, unless Windows Mobile 7 has all the features people want like multi touch and proper tilt detection, then others like Android will step up to fill the gaps. For application software, there will continue to be a push into the so-called cloud computing concept where you use applications based on the web to keep your data. I don't think that this will work out as well as the providers hope they will.

I also predict that Google will lose some ground this year as people realise that they are a company who wants to take over your life on the Internet. Yahoo, and, as much as I hate to suggest it, Bing may be better search options to use. Google seem to have too much bias when it comes to providing information. When such groups start to filter what you can find, then it is time to move on.

I still am not convinced that people will want to use touch screens. Every time that has been tried in the past it has not worked so well. Using some other technology like gloves or video detection might be a better approach. This is one area that I'll be watching myself because it is a little hard to predict.

There will of course be more powerful graphics cards and more realistic action in computer games. There will also be a lot more web-based games. As far as the console is concerned, I'm picking the Nintendo Wii for gaining more ground this year at the expense of the PS3.

The PS3 is a great platform but it doesn't have the same appeal as the Wii and the latter's marketing is also a lot better.

I expect to see a few US newspapers fold this year as the online news services there take on more credibility. It will also happen as people realise that they have been somewhat biased in their coverage of some topic areas.

I'm still hoping that the major music labels will finally understand that their digital music models are still not working very well. DRM is a failed model and has done nothing to limit piracy through illegal downloads. All DRM has managed to do over its lifetime is inconvenience those who do pay for their music. A successful model is as simple as making the price point right, giving access to tracks that are no longer available to buy on a CD and give something extra, for example the guitar chords for the songs.

I'm still also waiting for that magic jump in notebook battery life. There have been some incremental improvements last year but nothing newsworthy. Instead of spending all that time and effort on alternative energy solutions that do not work very well, how about spending some of that time on improving battery life, across the board. I predict that nothing much will happen in this area this year but I really hope I'm wrong.

Finally for my IT predictions this year, I expect to see countries put great effort into expanding and building their Internet capability. The promised build-up in Australia will not happen but in other places the networking will be expanded and upgraded. With the growth in user numbers this will be essential. Unfortunately the world will still not get together and act on spam or malware, even though these take up a significant portion of the world's bandwidth and causes real losses all across the globe.

To finish with a couple of non-IT predictions. I expect to see a follow-on financial crisis this year in places like the US and Australia, but not quite so much in Asia. I also predict that 2010 will be the year that many people realise that they have been conned by the anthropogenic global warming scares of previous years and it will go the way of Cold Fusion and the infamous Piltdown Man. Environmentalists, science and scientists in general will take a big hit from the exposure of this hoax as well.

No matter what 2010 brings as far as technology developments, I wish all of our readers a happy, healthy and positive 2010.

Email: jclhein@gmail.com