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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One of the speculations, that seems to came true is the one about Apple’s 10 inch tablet, a bigger version of an iPod/iPhone that will come by default with 3G connectivity, allowing users to access the Internet while on the move. Of course Apple didn’t confirm any information about this device, but sources seem to indicate Apple is trying to launch its 10 inch tablet PC in September, together with new members of the iPod family.

Apple tablet artistic rendering concept

As you can imagine I don’t know any more details that already surfaced, like the fact that the hardware architecture inside Apple’s tablet will likely be an ARM based one, not an Intel Atom as previously speculated. Testimony to this is last year’s 278M $ buyout of PA Semi, a microprocessor company, specialized in low power architectures.

It’s said that Steve Jobs personally supervised the product’s development, as it always did with special products like the iPhone, so I expect it to be a pretty out of ordinary device. So let’s break it down to what we can expect from it:

What to expect from the 10 inch Apple tablet

• multi touch delight: imagine a 10 inch iPhone which can recognize up to 10 fingers moves. This will get iphone covers manufacturers to get new models on market soon
• amazing games for a portable console, but not at PC experience level
• operating system derived from iPhone’s OS
• at least 6-7 hours of operation with WiFi or 3G connection on
• price between iPhone and cheapest MacBook Pro (subsidized price, as it seems Apple will only sell it with a contract)
• simple design with not so many buttons, so no QWERTY keyboard (I don’t like that)
• small weight, under 2 lbs and thin body (maybe thinner than MacBook Air)

So that’s my take on the 10 inch Apple tablet. What do you expect from it? Do you think it will be a winner or just an Apple fanboy must have?

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Modern product launch

Things have changed lately, as companies have started to ‘leak’ Beta versions, to give to users free of charge technological previews and release candidates (Windows 7 is one such example). Stirring a Buzz before the actual/official launch of a products is now an active part of the marketing process.

That’s a good thing because now users are involved from the development stage and companies can adjust/rethink their products before it’s too late for them. Of course, you must be careful to not stir a Buzz and then not be capable of launching the product in time, see Sony Ericsson with Xperia X1, which made everyone droll but it came too late, at about one year after the first presentation, in which time other manufacturers launched better products to market.

This is what I call making good use of the social factor that seems to drive the web right now.

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