I didn’t attend CES this year but the good ol’ RSS reader made sure I didn’t miss a thing, so in this post I’ll try and make a list of the digital trends I foresee ahead in the years to come.

Phone concept

What will we buy in the next years?

Touch tablets: by far touch tablets (slate type, MID or convertibles) will see a huge growth and thing will really get out of control once we’ll see the Apple tablet at work in a few months. There’s only one obstacle to overtake and that’s customized software to take advantage of the new input method.

3D displays for home use: I’ve seen Avatar last year and was amazed by the technology, not so much by the script of the movie. It’s only natural for such a technology to hit home HDTVs and even camcorders a few moments later. Gaming industry had received it last year but it’s nothing like IMAX and it’s not mainstream yet.

Pico projectors: that’s a hard sell this time but as technology will evolve in price and quality there’s no reason not to believe we’ll find pico projectors in every cell phone or laptop/tablet device. It’s so convenient to see a movie or a presentation on a 20-30 inch display.

Watch phones: those James Bond style gadgets will definitely benefit from miniaturization and we might see them as the perfect accessory that will display only notifications and allow for basic phone functionality in conjunction to a master device that will be accessed only in important moments. Wearing a watch phone won’t make you James Bond but you’ll still be respected by some

eReaders: even if in today’s world people don’t read too much books thanks to all multimedia distractions around us, but Amazon with its Kindle eReader apparently paved the way for a comeback and other manufacturers are following them, announcing very interesting eBook readers prototypes at CES, adding on features and increasing competition, which is always a good thing for consumers.

Smartbooks: this is very interesting as I wouldn’t believe last year that there will be something smaller, cheaper and easier to use that netbooks in the laptops niche but it seems manufacturers and marketing departments managed to squeeze a new type of gadget right between MIDs and netbooks. Smartbooks are simpler netbooks in terms of capabilities (they offer basic features like Internet access, multimedia player, widgets etc) in a smaller package powered by latest gen smartphone hardware (think Qualcomm’s SnapDragon 1GHz CPU) and customized OSes based on Android and various Linux distributions.

For now those are the trends I see taking off in the near future but feel free to add yours in the comment box below. As a personal curiosity I don’t understand why there are no trends for women, like pink bluetooth headset, pink laptops and such.

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It’s natural to believe things will change in the future, as technology evolved a lot and will evolve even further. Already researchers are working on new ways to control a computer. One of the latest achievements is the gestural interface where you move your hand in front of the display that then reads your movements and translates them in commands that move for example objects on screen.

The practical applications are unlimited and the ease of use is also a big point here. Researchers say that gestural interfaces could be implemented on all kinds of devices, including cellphones. Imagine that your cellphone could vibrate, not just ring when it ‘sees’ you’re not paying attention. It could also change your theme according to your modd and so on. You could shut down the computer with only one gesture, you could draw letters in the air and so on.

Of course those types of user inputs could work in conjunctions as for example typing is faster on a keyboard or speech can be used when writing long texts, the you’ll switch back when you’re done. Things we’ve seen in movies like Minority Report could mean reality, not science fiction in a few years, but the ultimate step, if you ask me, is the direct interface with the human brain.

The human brain is the ultimate computer. It’s the one that controls our body, so it seems natural to me to link if to our computers. Cyborgs could be just around the corner but not like the ones you see in movies, of course. The speed of thought is greater than any other gesture you might do to give a command. Do you agree or think this is too sci-fi?

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Multitasking

Practically I write small articles (try and write on a phone keyboard for more than 30 minutes and your fingers will catch fire) and always put small notes in places where I must get a link or double check stuff or insert pictures. And I always write about topics I’m familiar with so I don’t need to get any documentation checked or I’ve already read about it the day before on my desktop PC.

What’s stopping us from multitasking on a phone and do some real work?

• first there’s the small screen which makes reading really hard, plus pictures download harder on a phone, taking more time and bandwidth to check
• limited power means you can’t run a browser with multiple tabs opened and you can’t also run a text editing suite, a graphic editor for pictures and listen to music in background without affected performance
• last but not least the interface of mobile apps prevent us from being proficient as we’re just at the beginning of the mobile revolution and we have limited mobile usability knowledge

How about the future?

I’m afraid things don’t look too good as screen size can’t increase too much without affecting size thus portability is compromised.

Hardware specs will increase but it’s just enough to cope with the increasing performance demand from software apps: it’s just like with PCs where increased performance doesn’t necessarily means faster overall experience but more like complex programs.

Software is the only one that will make a significant change in how we work using a Smartphone but don’t forget that we’re dealing with a small device after all, not a fully fledged workstation. So a laptop will always be slower than a desktop, but faster than a Smartphone. That’s the way things are folks but this doesn’t stop us from dreaming.

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Imagine in this context how a modern CPU is held down when it needs data stored on a turtle slow HDD. Things are moving tough in the right direction, with SSD becoming more and more affordable. The ancient floppy disk was replaced by USB and external drives.

My recent deja-vu with old problems

I’ve switched from Picasa to Flickr so naturaly I’ve started getting the pictures from one place to another. As Picasa doesn’t have an open API I had to get my old DVD disks, copy them to my system and then upload them one folder at a time.

The ‘operation’ begun, everything went perfect with the first few DVDs, but I got to one that blocked the copy. I ejected the disk, cleaned it and did try again. No luck. I went to google for programs that try and recover bad files from scratched DVDs. I was optimistic as the disk wasn’t that scratched and I had worse disks that copy fine.

… After 3 days of using various programs for file copy/recovery I just gave up. What is lost is lost (I still got the small resolution files from Picasa), but I cannot stop and wonder why on earth none of my optical drives managed to copy from a CD that’s not too badly scratched.

Also why programs used for copying files still freeze if they find a file that’s unreadable. I’ve also used programs that skip through bad files but they were so bad that after 10 hours they’re read 7 files and skipped only 2.

There are problems I’ve had with optical media since I’ve started using CDs. None of them lasted 10 year (projected life of recordable disks) and I bet a stamped disk (mass-produced) won’t last 100 years.

The future?

Imagine you’re using 6-7 years from now the optical standard of that time, a disk that can store all your multimedia collections, all your work and programs in a multi terabytes space. What it you get a perpendicular scratch that affects all tracks (worst case, but highly possible). You loose everything. I’ve lost a few hundred megabytes of pictures thanks to a few surface scratches (disks were stored, not lended or exposed to dust/sun). What if it was something more important?

I don’t know about you but I don’t plan on using optical disks for storage in the future.

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Touch screen might be the future

The thing is that I’m not a touch screen fan, even if I’ve loved some of my Windows Mobile devices. As I see it touchscreen technology has big disadvantages, but I think this has a lot to do with my mobile habbits and may not apply to many of you, so let’s see them.

Disadvantages of touch screen

• screen has to be really big not to miss things when pressing them with your finger: I only like HTC Touch HD, screen size wise, and big screen means increased size of the device
• big screen leads to low battery life
• touchscreen means screen can’t be read too well in direct sunlight as it applies an additional not 100% transparent
• touchscreen devices usually has no additional keys (see the iPhone) and this means when an app crashes, without crashing the OS, you can’t get to the main menu as the whole screen becomes unresponsive
• touchscreens usually have low precision, virtual QWERTY keyboards being one of the most annoying things
• most user interfaces are not optimized for thumb operation, so a stylus in necessary, and this means using two hands
• screens get very dirty
• these devices require massive computing power which leads to slow devices and low battery life

Advantages of touch screen devices

• big screen is ideal for web browsing, picture and movies
• touchscreen gadgets usually have simple user interfaces, which are more intuitive (iPhone once again is a good example)
• touchscreen devices have fewer buttons that might break after a few months/years of operation

For me, as I use to work sometimes on my Nokia E71 smartphone, I need something fast, that can multitask (copy paste between applications) and a QWERTY keyboard for typing long messages or documents. Size is also important and newer touchscreen gadgets are anything but small.

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What do you want WEB 3.0 to do for you?

Don’t tell me that I should come back from time to time and update the price. That doesn’t hold when you have a few hundred posts on your blog and it shouldn’t be a solution, at least not an optimal one. Then I got thinking about content that updates itself. Don’t confuse it with content that writes itself, but regular content with small pieces of information that are updated automatically when things change, things like price, availability or address.

I don’t know how to call those pieces of information, but I bet you’d want your store address to be updated automatically everywhere on the Internet where someone mentioned it. It’s useful for other things too, not just from businesses point of view. This is what I would like to see in WEB 3.0. Definitely.

Think that content that updates itself automatically will make older pieces of content worth reading again. Will also clean up the garbage in many search engine results. Update means in this case up to date. So, what do you want WEB 3.0 to do for you?

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The Chevrolet Volt electric car, will it save US auto industry?

Now, back to electric cars and why I think they’re not the answer we are all looking for. Let’s see the list of reasons, as I usually write:

• battery technology is not developed enough to allow fast charge times at an “electric station”so we’re talking about home recharging – that’s will not happen with people not living in a house with its own back yard and garage
• the current used for charging the batteries is produced by using sources of energy that are polluting the atmosphere so alternate fuels are the way to go, like ethanol or hydrogen
• by the times battery technology evolves enough (fast recharge + lower prices) hydrogen technology will take over as it’s a more ecological technology
• a car that doesn’t sound like a car is not a car, that what petrol heads say. Can you imagine how an electric Ferrari roadster will sound like?

So, what do you think about electric cars, where will them be a few years from now?

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Composite illustration of a CPU building process

A short general “How is made” presentation of the micro processor building process:

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This is a growing trend, launched by various small Chinese companies, a trend that is now embraced by LG with the GD910, a pretty stylish watch. I don’t know if I would buy now a watch phone, but this is surely a trend to watch as in the future people will need something smaller than current phones (I’m talking about the people who don’t need fancy phones).

If the first watch phones were not that great looking what LG has to offer si pretty nice and makes room for other to improve on design. Take a look below:

The LG GD910 watch phone

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I don’t want to write a preview, but just to make a short list of the ups and downs I’ve found for the Nokia Tube, as it was called before any official announcement, when was seen in the Dark Knight movie.

Pros

• Nice interface, intuitive, 95% of buttons are easy to press with finger, no need for the included stylus
• Fast for a touchscreen smartphone. It seems faster if you made the switch from Windows Mobile
• Nice audio quality and you can use your own headset
• Included web browser supports flash
• Various input options
• The included 8 GB microSD card will make you forget the need to free up space
• Ours came with included music files, around 300 MB

Cons

• A little big on the bulky side
• Not much software applications at this time, but will surely change in the future
• Way too little options for the home screen
• Touchscreen not very responsive
• Plasticky feel and build materials are of questionable quality

That’s it for now. I will update this post with future impressions of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. Till then here’s a short video done by my colleagues.

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Last winter holidays netbooks sales skyrocketed (on Amazon.com 17 of 25 bestseller notebooks were sub 500$ netbooks). Everything seems good but I think I’ve spotted where all this thing is going.

But first let’s remember the times where 12 inch notebooks were called ultra-portables and were about 2000$ at least. That’s a lot for a less powerful computer with less features, smallish screen and cramped keyboard.

Netbooks will go slowly towards bigger screens: 12-13 inch and will add up performance, but not too much as they will trail regular laptops in performance figures. What makes me say that netbooks will transition towards bigger screens? Well, size matters, smaller it better in laptops but to a point where it’s hard to see fully fledged websites without horizontal and vertical scroll.

Also typing on a small keyboard is no joy, even if you put a high price on portability. That’s why netbooks will retain their 1-1.5 kilograms weight but in a slimmer package thanks to bigger screens. I’m pretty sure that in the next 12-18 months we’ll see netbooks as half size/half price notebooks.

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Now that’s what I call a bad title, as it doesn’t tell you anything about what’s inside the article, but since I’m no targeting any SEO keywords here please bear with me and listen to what I have to say. I love gadgets, I love IT&C and that means I love two of the fastest moving industries around.

But this year was worse than the others as the rhythm seems to get faster. Remember the time they announced a new thing, you prepared for it, saved some money and just bought it the first days it was available. Now this year showed me how it’s like for something new to be announced just before the previous best thing was about to hit stores.

Now I have two examples for you that will make clear what I want to say: HTC Diamond -> HTC Touch PRO -> HTC Touch HD and Nokia E71 -> Nokia 5800 Xpress Music -> Nokia N97 (the most recent must have). In both cases the second product was announced just before the first one hit the shelves and the third one was announced again before the second had appeared.

For me, a gadget freak, that’s just torture as all year I’ve been waiting for the next best smartphone to buy and finally I got stuck with an “intermediate” Nokia E51 that I got when my beloved Windows Mobile PDA Phone broke (who could imagine that a gadget would eventually break after repeatedly hitting the concrete kitchen floor).

Now how about you, are you still living with past century gadgets or you’re waiting for the iPhone 4G?

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As you expect from Google, their software suite will heavily interact online with the existing applications like Google Maps and their search engine. If that’s not your thing you can always write your own code, and maybe with the 10 millions dollars prize offered by Google for the best app for Android.

Watch the video after the jump to learn more, of go here for more videos about the technology behind Android.

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Let’s start with the origin of the evangelist, which is a religious term that describes a person that preaches the word of God and converts people to Christianity. Similar to a Christian Evangelist, an Technology, or Technical Evangelist spreads the word on new technologies and tries to make people use them.

The first technology evangelist was Guy Kawasaki, who worked then for Apple Computer. The role of this often unofficial job is to pursue people in buying and using new technology, along with creating cult like fanaticism over a certain product.

Now that you’ve understand what a Technology Evangelist does let’s see what you show know in order to become one. Besides the ability to convince people you need sales and training abilities, because Evangelists are not used only to sell something but also to encourage people inside big organizations to do things in a new way, abandoning old methods.

If you want to know more I recommend you Selling the Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company, or Ideas-And Make a Difference-Using Everyday Evangelism, a great book by Guy Kawasaki, the man who started it all.

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For around 400 $ you get the following specs [source]:

• Processor: Intel Celeron M ULV 900MHz
• Storage: 4GB of Flash based storage (SSD)
• Memory: 512MB of RAM
• OS: Linux (Asus customized)
• Screen: 7-inch screen with 800 x 480 resolution
• Ports: 3 USB, 1 monitor, headphone jack, microphone input, SD card reader (SDHC compatible), Kensington lock slot, Ethernet 10/100
• Webcam (0.3 MP)
• Battery: 4-cell 5200 mA (rated at 3.5 hours)
• Wireless: 802.11b/g Atheros
• Input: Keyboard and Touchpad

It doesn’t seem too much, but bear in mind that it’s enough for web browsing and Office work. It’s light: just one kilo, it’s powerful enough, and costs a fraction of a fully equiped Sony Vaio TZ. If will surely give a run for it’s money to OLPC.

There will be also other versions, with storage space ranging from 2 to 8 GB, and even Windows XP operating system. It seems that the demand for low cost laptops is there. I wouldn’t mind buying an Eee PC, but depends on how much will it cost in Eastern Europe, where I live.

But enough with the talk, let’s see a video with ASUS Eee PC made by me with the sample I’ve received today.

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All this sounds ok, but I’m guessing you don’t know what health problems we are exposed to if we use computers too much. A few weeks ago I’ve came across a short list of health problems caused by a geek lifestyle, but I didn’t had time to tell you about them, till today.

So, let’s take them one by one:

• Sleep disorders – insomnia or often awakening during the nights. Cause is frequent use on PC or laptop right after you wake up. Resolution is pretty simple, don’t lay in bad working, just do something that doesn’t stimulate your brain too much.
• Headaches – often caused by improper environment surrounding computer use. Check your screen position, room lighting, chair, glasses.
• Back pain – caused by improper chair sitting position and prolonged absence of back muscles exercises
• Poor attention span – that’s very interesting. We are used to do multitasking, working with different programs at the same time and being concentrated on several points on the screen, when feedback is expected. When we are facing only one task, we get bored faster, we can’t concentrate enough on the singular task. Meetings, when you have to be focus on the discussion is a killer. There isn’t too much you can do to correct this, as your brain takes longer to learn another work pattern.

As you can see, I’ve said “we” several times, as I consider myself an intensive computer user, with more than 10 hours a day of online time. Maybe future will solve those kind of health problems, but I’m not counting on it. I’m now trying to figure out a lifestyle that gets me enough time with my beloved computers without putting my life in danger. What do you think? Do you manage to escape the terrible force of online existence?

Update: if you’re interested in health issues related to computer use you can check this book about How to Be Pain Free and Relieve the Symptoms of Computer Stress Syndrome.

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They’ve posted a short video on Youtube showing that Apple iPhone contains chemicals that are not well regarded in European Union. On the other end comes Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola who managed to get green products for some time already.

That strikes me is that Apple made a statement a few months ago saying that they are really surprised to see they meet environment regulations, unlike other companies. Maybe they weren’t aware of the iPhone, as it was launched after that statement… yeah right.

See the video after the jump

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In fact the concept incorporates 4 vehicles, for 4 passengers, that travel together to a certain point, then the four modules split allowing them to “walk” different paths.

All is possible thanks to molecular biotechnology and AI (Artificial Intelligence), or better said, it will be possible around 2057. Take a look at the pictures below. More pictures here, on go4it.ro. [Source: Autoblog]

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