Posted on July 20th, 2010We are about halfway through the year, and the technological world has progressed by leaps and bounds already. So much so, that in their effort to keep up with the latest developments, people have been left gasping for breath. The first half of the year has been a roller coaster ride, with Apple creating a whole new market with their iPad, Intel and NVIDIA both caught lying, 3D displays cropping up everywhere, social networking going local and lots of accusations and cross-accusations in general. It’s surprising no one in Hollywood has come up with a good movie script to capture all this action!
So we decided to go ahead and deliver our own version of the story. Here we present fifteen items what we feel shook up the technological world and stirred many sleeping giants into action.
Apple
It is impossible not to make a “Best of…” list these days without mentioning an Apple product, be it the iPad, the iPhone or Macbooks which are taking the battle to Microsoft. We decided it would be best to give it its own category.
The first non-surprise was in January when Apple introduced the iPad. Everyone expected it. What no one expected, however, was that it would sell so many millions at such a breakneck speed and totally revive the entire tablet PC market that was so far left for dead. Apple has managed to send all major gadget manufacturers scrambling to make their own tablet. No one will admit, of course, that it was Apple who caused this wave.
The second non-surprise came in the form of iPhone 4 that was leaked well in advance by a careless employee. Gizmodo bought the prototype for a rumored sum of $5000 and proceeded to showcase it to the entire world. The launch, already marred by the leak, didn’t go as smoothly as expected, with Steve Jobs struggling to find a signal for most of the presentation.
That was just a sign of things to come. For the first time, the iPhone has received more negative flak than positive reviews. There were display issues, antenna issues and fragile glass issues. Of these, the antenna issue was the most widely covered. Accusations of Steve Jobs sending an arrogant reply, news of Apple trying to downplay it by claiming it to be a software issue and threats of class lawsuit actions kept the news readers on the edge of their seats, before Steve Jobs cleared it all with a news conference, offering buyers nothing more than a free case.
Microsoft
Microsoft hasn’t really been having the best of years so far. It’s little wonder, too, considering that leaked slides of a future desktop OS took the limelight. Nothing they have done so far this year has worked, leading people to wonder if Steve Ballmer shouldn’t be thrown out.
Announcement of killing the Kin after just 6 weeks on the market sent shockwaves through the industry. There have been plenty of rumors about the number of devices that were sold, with most pinning it down south of 10,000. Most attribute this failure to the resignation of J Allard, who was previously heading the Kin vision, and Lees, who came in midway through the development cycle and ordered the engineers to go back to the drawing board.
Before that, people had already lost a lot of love for Microsoft after news spread that the Courier was no longer being worked upon. Many had expected it to revolutionize the industry. That never happened.
The Surface, meanwhile, hasn’t been seeing much development too. There are a few demos now and then, but nothing to write home about.
The only positive news so far is of Windows 7 selling like hot cakes, at the rate of 7 copies every second!
Apple, Microsoft and Google are all entering each other’s businesses more and more these days. So it was difficult for us not to mention this particular company, whose claim to fame till only a couple of years back was internet advertising.
Google is trying to revolutionize the television industry with Google TV. Its yet another attempt to combine television and the web, something that hasn’t been too successful in the past. But Google, which in itself is a force to be reckoned with, has the support of other biggies like Sony, intel and Logitech, the last of which has already released a set-top box.
There have been rumors of it trying to enter the travel market too, following in Bing’s footsteps. But there is no concrete data to support this yet.
In what is sure to be a let-down for fans of this giant, it has killed speculation about a Nexus Two. But hey, they didn’t say they won’t release a phone with a better name!
3D Invasion
3D displays and technologies seem to be cropping up everywhere these days. While 3D movies have been produced for years, the recent wave of development can be attributed to the global success of Avatar, the Hollywood blockbuster.
The first ominous sign was Youtube starting to support 3D videos. It also showed viewers that there is more to 3D than just putting on glasses. A standard 3D video gives more than 10 viewing options.
The slew of 3D TVs and Cameras immediately started. Sony, Samsung and LG were at the forefront of it all. Samsung ended up launching the first commercial 3D TV. The cumbersome glasses aside, there is still note enough content to reason people into buying 3D TVs. Yet, that’s one pinnacle that Samsung can claim to have been the first to reach.
Even as many bloggers continues to dismiss 3D as a gimmick, Nintendo came out with its 3DS, bringing 3D to portable console gaming for the first time. They also included a 3D camera for good measure. They intelligently included a feature to turn of the 3D. For the record, the 3DS does not require the user to wear any glasses, though that also means there is a very small range of viewing angles.
Talking of 3D gaming, Sony has introduced it in their PS3 too, albeit with glasses.
Motion gaming
After 3D, this is another technology that bloggers are claiming to be a gimmick. While the Wii has been critically acclaimed and driven Nintendo to the top of the console market again, the newly introduced Microsoft Kinect and Sony Move have faced a lot of flak.
The Move is nothing better than a fancy version of the Wii. Granted, it has games of higher graphics capabilities, but it is just as expensive too, coming at $99 for the bundle.
Kinect, on the other hand, has had no demos of interesting games so far. It’s not much fun to exercise or dance in front of your TV. Certainly not enough to account for the $149 price tag.
Whether the Move and Kinect connect with the masses remains to be seen. But there’s no debating the fact that all major console manufacturers have taken a firm step in the direction of motion gaming. There’s no looking back now.
Better computer interfaces
This works hand in hand with motion gaming, since the technology is the same for the most part. Companies have been trying to re-invent the way humans interact with computers. Much before 2010, in fact, we saw Sixth Sense, a project by Pranav Mistry at MIT.
We have already seen a huge change in the last three years in the form of touchscreens. Everything these days is moving to touch, even water taps and remote controls (By the way, did we mention taps?).
The next logical step, of course, is to detect a touch before it is made. Meet Cyress, a display manufacturing company that has invented a panel that senses a finger hovering above it. Best way to have smudge-free screens, we say.
But even touch is becoming old fashioned now. People don’t even want to raise a finger anymore. Well, maybe just a finger. You can interact with Kinect just by waving your arms. Laptop manufacturers are trying to bring similar functionality through their webcams.
All these ideas have been around for more than a few years, but it’s only in 2010 that these are well and truly beginning to take shape.
Mobile phone revolutions
Did anyone notice that we spoke about Apple, Google and Microsoft without mentioned the one big field where all three of them are intensely competing? That’s because we wanted to talk about mobile phone operating systems in this section.
2010 is the year where mobile operating systems are undergoing a complete overhaul. You know it’s true when Microsoft, for the first time in years, has been called innovative regarding its Windows Phone 7 OS. We couldn’t be gladder about it, considering the competition it is up against. There’s Apple with its iOS4. It still lags behind in functionality, sure, but it makes up for it with the striking UI it has retained since 2007. There’s Google, with Android 2.2 and the promise of Android 3.0. There’s the Symbian community working on Symbian^3 and HP which just acquired WebOS. The one that excites us most, however, is Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo for mobile devices. For the first time, a mobile phone will be able to run full blown desktop programs. Remember Nokia’s tagline for its N95 advertisements – “Is this what computers have become?” Well, they could reuse it for their MeeGo phones!
There’s plenty of development on the hardware front to. 8 megapixels cameras have become commonplace. Nokia’s upcoming N8, Sony Ericsson’s already available Vivaz and a few other phones already feature 12 megapixel cameras. The N8 also features the biggest sensor in a phone, much bigger than even what many digital cameras can offer.
Processor speeds have been growing rapidly. 1 GHz is touted to be the minimum on future Android devices. Motorola has promised a 2 GHz phone by the end of the year. RAM has been pushed up to 512 MB. To put things in perspective, a desktop computer three years ago that came with 256 MB RAM was considered to be high-end.
Social Networking
Social networking is growing at an exponential pace. Facebook has crossed 400 million members, Twitter has moved north of 100 million members.
But the biggest news, and what eventually proved to be the biggest dud, of the year was Google Buzz. It gained users pretty rapidly thanks to its generosity of allocating one account to each Gmail user. But that is no measure of success. Buzz went the Wave way and barely anyone is using is. The users mostly belong to a niche, just like Wave users. We can consider it successful the day when all webmasters include a “buzz” button between their “tweet” and “like” buttons!
Google tried to attract the public with its Wave service too. But it seems the year belongs to the war between Twitter and Facebook.
FourSquare
Such a service would normally be included in “networking”, but this has caused such a massive fan following in such a short period that it deserves a category of its own. Foursquare is a location based social networking service, where users can make friends, earn points for visiting venues like restaurants and make recommendations to other friends. The user accounts can also be linked with Twitter and Facebook.
Before Foursquare, there were attempts by Gowalla, Brightknife, etc. But none of them managed to achieve more than a million members in one year! This service was launched in March 2009 and has already crossed 1.3 million members. Users seem to love competing against each other to become the ‘Mayor’ of a venue, though it doesn’t guarantee them any key to the city.
GPU, CPU and dirty play
Project FASTRA has been around for quite a while now, showing the world what is possible with a GPU. The surprisingly fast performance has led to NVIDIA announcing that GPUs are the future of computing, and will soon be much more important than CPUs. It showed performance comparisons where the GPU is 100 times faster than Intel CPUs.
These validity of these tests, however, became debatable recently when it was found that PhySX, which NVIDIA had been using for performance tests, was de-optimized for the CPU. This would mean that all tests performed so far would be invalid, bringing the war of CPU vs. GPU back to square one.
This hasn’t been the first time that NVIDIA has been blamed for faking results. Back in January AMD had alleged that NVIDIA had de-optimized PhySX for multi-core CPUs. NVIDIA emphatically denied allegations, of course.
In the past, Intel has been blamed for similar things. It seems we won’t have a clear winner for quite a few years.
Faster networks everywhere
WiMax in US, 3G in India and 4G being worked upon in countries like Japan and Korea. It seems mobile networks are getting faster everywhere. Sprint in the US has been marketing its WiMax signal as 4G. Researchers in Asian and European countries are working upon the real 4G. mobile networks the world over are set to become very fast indeed.
It’s not just mobile networks that are getting faster however. Broadband is getting faster too! Researchers in MIT recently introduced a method call Optical Flow Switching that eliminates the need to convert optical signals to electric ones at routers, making transmission speeds faster. This comes hot on the heels of a 2008 development that enabled labs to use scratched glass to switch signal paths. All the time, the technology for converting optical signals to electric ones at the client end is getting better.
Get ready for speeds faster than you ever imagined, pretty soon. Download progress bars might just be added to the endangered species list.
Paperbacks vs E-readers
The war between printed media and e-readers is reaching a whole new level. Amazon, when it introduced the Kindle, gave the world a sign of things to come a little while back. This year, after the introduction of the iPad with its amazing iBooks experience, the debate whether we still need printed media is heating up again. The slew of tablet PCs lined up for late 2010 and early 2011 are going to do their bit to pull away readers from printed media.
The biggest advantage offered by e-readers, apart from storing thousands of books in a device no thicker than a standard magazine, is the ease of shopping for content. And you will always have your morning newspaper delivered to you. You no longer need to rely on the newspaper boy. Barnes and Noble slashed the price of their Nook to $199. This was promptly followed by an announcement from Amazon, declaring the price of Kindle to be $189. This makes e-readers a tempting option for most casual readers.
Stanford recently announced that they will be replacing as many as 70,000 books with their digital counterparts. Certainly reason enough for printing presses to be worried.
Better displays
Display technology is all the rage in 2010. 3D displays, e-ink displays, Super AMOLED…the pace of development is fast enough to leave one dizzy.
Let’s take mobile phones to start with. Transreflective resistive screens are now passé. We have advanced LCD screens, AMOLED and now, thanks to Samsung, Super AMOLED. The visibility of these displays in direct sun leaves a lot to be desired, but the technologies are improving by leaps and bounds. Even within these displays, manufacturers are trying to improve screen resolution. First there were companies like HTC that managed to fit 800 px x 400 px in a 4 inch screen. Then along came Apple and blew away everyone with its 326 ppi screen.
E-readers are getting better too. E-ink displays are getting faster. Pixel Qi is working to bring color to their e-ink displays. We might see color e-readers sooner than you expect.
Pixel Qi also introduced, and quickly sold out, a dual mode display for laptops and tablet PCs that allows users to switch off the backlight for better viewing in direct sunlight. Hit the link to see how the display looks outside. We love it.
Oh, and before we end this section, you might want to take a look at the extremely flexible displays being worked upon by Sony and HP.
Electric Vehicles
Battery technology is always being worked upon to provide faster electric cars with longer ranges. But the biggest news of the year, one that made us sit up and take notice, is the plan of Telekom Austria to convert the rarely used phone booths into car charging stations. In hindsight, it looks like a no-brainer. You have these thousands of electric stations which are rarely being used, and you have these electric cars that are looking for a place to charge themselves. Why not use these phone booths as refueling stations for electric cars? This is one project that we definitely hope gets underway.
It’s also nice to see that in the race to develop the best electric car, people haven’t forgotten motorcycles. Case in point- the Brammo Empulse that can go 100+ miles on a single charge, hitting a top speed of 100 mph.
Cloud Computing
Last, but not the least, one thing that always remains hot is cloud computing. More and more data is being moved to the cloud. The advantages for companies are obvious, but what about the common man?
Let’s take a look at mSpot. It lets you store up to 2 GB of music online for free. That allows you to listen to your music from anywhere you want, without having to sync music in all your devices. Then there’s Opera Unite that allows you to share your computer data through the cloud.
And lest we forget, allow us to remind you about HP’s upcoming line of printers that promises to allow you to print your documents no matter where you are. The plan is to connect every printer to the web, give it a unique email id and allow you to email documents to it for printing.
That’s our list of the 15 best tech trends in 2010. If you think we missed anything, let it be known in the comments below. If you think some things didn’t deserve to be included, or that some that deserved to be included weren’t, we are open to debate, too. We’d also like to know which of these you rate as the most interesting this year. So leave a comment!