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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