Your camera, camcorder, phone, pda, music player, sat nav et al will be one device. Low-budget cameras and suchlike as separate entities will to a large extent, follow the dodo. Your pc will also become one with your tv and its associated devices. This is in a general way of course. There will still be of course fancy SLR's and other such specialised or high end devices for those that want or need them. Discuss.
The PSP already has most of the features I want in a portable device. The only thing it is missing is a telephone, a TV tuner, and a digital camera worth a damn. You can already add a 1.3 megapixel camera to it, but that is not enough, IMHO. And it was surfing the internet wirelessly long before the iPhone. As for TV, I already watch TV on my computer via a TV tuner video card. And I can also surf the internet on my Wii. What I see happening eventually is the PS4 or Xbox3 not being a console, per se, but it would end up being a circuit board, just like when you buy a video card or sound card. You install this 'card' (which really is a console) into your computer, and there is your PS4. If you have another slot, you can install your Xbox3. Put any game into your computer's high density drive, and it'll play the game, as long as you have the appropriate card installed.
That's not really a prediction so much as an observation of what's already happening and what's already been planned. The big themes at some of the Consumer Electronics Shows have been convergence. I see a device that functions like a laptop but is roughly the side of a pda, with all the functions that a laptop can have in addition to being a camera and camcorder. I see TV's getting eliminated as high speed broadband and internet content becomes more popular, with shows being played over the web via multicasting at specific times, making cable obsolete. As far as PC's, I see the future heading towards touchscreen monitors, where you interact and type by pressing on your monitor or on a fully customizable keyboard with ultimately 100% programmable keys. I see most existing devices becoming more and more electronic, with networking between multiple devices, your house would be wired to the internet, and you'd be able to turn anything on remotely or to pipe content from room to room.
My dad's phone has a camera, is a PDA, plays music, goes to websites (you can also check and reply to email), and has a GPS. I forget the model. Remind me to ask him.
I see an EMP strike over Europe, the US and Japan. To quote Snake Plissken, 'Welcome to the stone age' To quote the perps: 'Whoops, sorry ' Anyway, yes, maybe there will be more all-in-one products. Of course miniaturization costs quality. For example, cellphone cameras with miniscule optics will never, ever be as good as a DSLR with huge lens, no matter how good the software gets (and the software saves the day with these things). A PDA-phone connected to the living room stereo will never give the same sound quality as a high end CD/SACD player. What I see is that the PC or its future incarnations will become the 'center of activities' with wireless devices connecting to it via some kind of long-range, wireless and private VPN. For example, you'd be able to show photos, which are stored on the home server in you basement, to your buddies without carrying them with you in a physical sense, eg a memory card or something. You'd need no online service like Picasa either because you have direct access to your own data repository. There are two problems with miniature all-in-one devices, tho: 1. when it breaks, everything breaks. If the HTC Touch I'm typing this post on breaks, I'd lose internet access, my contacts (crucial for me as I cannot for the life of me remember a phone number even after typing it a hundred times), my appointments, a ton of music, audio books, my backup camera, and of course the phone. There is no backup as I have neither laptop nor desktop PC here, and if I did, they could break too. The perfect solution would be that private connection to a home server I mentioned above. How it would work technically when you're in the middle of nowhere as I am now? No idea, but there's lots of satellites buzzing around. The second problem are the small screens. When I left Austria in the fall, there was a battle raging about the mobile TV rights to EURO 08. I mean, come on - I have a hard time watching FUTURAMA on the Touch's 320x240 screen, how the hell would one watch a footie game? Colored blobs chasing a white pixel? Yeah well, that sounds exciting. As for the home I can see walls that double as OLED displays. You can have a movie night with friends where the whole wall becomes one big screen, or you can divide it up between users - it's the end of the fight for the remote control
heh, when ePaper was first mooted, the very first thing i though of was using it to wallpaper offices with. you could tailor the whole room to specific types of meeting then - a new psychological business tool, and almost a holodeck.
Hmm, some sort of miniature home colonscope/electric toothbrush maybe? Oh, and it'll play MP3s. Everything will play MP3s.
I am eagerly waiting for the day when most of these devices an fit into a pair of sunglasses. Actually, before all this stuff is just implanted, I could envison a device with an OLED display in glasses then eventually contacts, with maybe a keyboard that is part of a wrist device (ala Futurama or Capitan Jack's wrist thingy on Torchwood) and maybe a small device the size of a deck of cards or even smaller that holds all the memory and processing power. You;d keep that in a pocket or on a belt, or it's be part of your clothes even... All connected by bluetooth, or course. (Or maybe the main processor and such will be somewhere else, and we'll all connect to it wirelessly via the glasses and keyboard. Or we'd access it via a subscription service...)
Screw glasses, a scanning laser that locks onto your eyeballs with face recognition, then beams it right into your retina, and stays locked in no matter where you put the box.
I want bionics. And the infrastructure to support them. Nothing fancy, just an RFID chip in my hand. Then it would be keyed to start my car, open any and all locks I use, provide my ID, etc. Some areas would be write-protected, but there would be some space for you to use yourself--put in your shopping list, tell people if you're "on the market", etc. OMG. I just realized. This development--which is implementable NOW--would fulfill my OTHER dream: a RADAR gun-like device that I could bring to bars, point at women, and "scan them" to find out if they are single, etc, and how old they are.
Sony already has a service similar to this on their PS3/PSP. You put your movie/MP3/Porn collection on your PS3's hard drive, and then you can access it anywhere with your PSP, as long as you have access to some sort of wireless internet connection. You can then turn on your PS3 at your home and download your data to your PSP. As for going anywhere with it, that is gonna be a problem for the forseeable future, I think. Sure, it's easy to pick up a connection when you're near a city, but if you're out in the middle of nowhere, you'll be hard pressed to find a signal. Satellite cable providers also have an ISP plan. You can download stuff at something like 1000x the speed of a cable modem, but you need a phone line to upload stuff, via 56k modem. So unless you want to carry a portable satellite dish with you to communicate with the satellite in orbit, I think it may be awhile before we can transmit signals to space with something as small as a hand held device.
Wearable computers, "with humans interacting with virtual overlays of reality almost all of the time. This is accomplished by wearing smart clothing and contact lenses that can overlay and replace what the eye would normally see with computer graphics." That's what I'm going with.
Eventually hardware will be transparent. Not in the sense that you can see through it, but that it will be ubiquitous and unobtrusive. In the short run I'd go for voice recognition smart home entertainment. Scrolling through guides and adjusting screen formats, turning on and off separate components sucks. I want it so the thing will respond to my wife: "show me a chick flick!" without me having to turn stuff on and find it on top of being forced to watch it.
Here's what I was talking about in regards to touchscreen technology, I wasn't aware this was even in existence until today but: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
Ah, yes, one day your computer will be a big ass table. That thing's not as cool as it first appears. For starters, it's $20K, next it's not really a touch screen, there's cameras underneath the table top that look for finger positions (so there's no way it can be a slim unit). Third, devices like cameras would need to be equipped with RFID tags and specialized transmitters to work with the table, it's not like you could plunk down a wifi or Bluetooth enabled camera you can buy now and have it work with it. Personally, if I'm going to plunk that kind of change for something that looks pretty, then I want a Magic Planet globe. [url="http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/where_have_all_the_true_inventors_gone_8520.asp]Rather cutting commentary on modern inventors. [/url]
When it comes to high tech gadgets, the US really gets the shaft. South Korea is the most wired country on the planet, with 90% of the people having high speed internet access. In England, they've got DVRs that can record every channel at once for two weeks. You can also watch all the recorded programs at the same time. In Europe, there's been phones that could do 99% of what the iPhone can do for a couple of years now.
AT&T has internet through large parts of Mississippi. You'd have to really try to go to the middle of nowhere to have no internet. Seriously. Find a Starbucks and you're set.
I want an mp3 player with Bluetooth and a digital camera. Or a digital camera with Bluetooth and an mp3 player.
