Digital Common Sense

PCWorld posted an interesting story yesterday

PC World’s 100 Fearless Forecasts
From inexpensive 20-megapixel cameras to 50-terabyte DVDs, here’s our definitive list of technologies we’re looking forward to seeing.
Richard Baguley and Eric Dahl, PC World

The standard dreams of future technology, such as intergalactic spaceships and do-everything robot servants, are still a ways off, but plenty of exciting technology advances will be here fairly soon.

We collected our forecasts into eight categories: Desktops and Laptops, Storage, Chips and Components, Audio and Video, The Net, Cameras and Cell Phones, and Fun Stuff. Feel free to read the list straight through, or just skip around in your favorite categories.

It’s a pretty extensive list. Here are some of my personal favorites from their list:

Accurate Speech Recognition
Though the vendor of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech-recognition
program claimed an accuracy of 99 percent, in our recent tests the
application managed an accuracy of only about 96 percent–not
bad, but not good enough. We don’t need perfection, but we are looking
forward to a speech-recognition system that is fast and accurate enough
to replace a keyboard for writing.

A PC That Runs All OSs
Choosing an
operating system should be like choosing a pair of shoes in the
morning: You pick the one that suits where you’re going. Apple has made
progress with Macs that can run MacOS and Windows, but we’re looking
forward to systems that can run any and all OSs, either separately or
all at once.

More Laptops With No Operating System
Lenovo just started selling its ThinkPad T60p laptops without an OS.
That’s ideal if you’re planning on running Linux, since you save a
hundred dollars that would have gone toward a copy of Windows you’d
never use. We hope other vendors will follow Lenovo’s lead.

The Day That Gigabytes Become Passé
In 2007 you’ll be able to buy 1-terabyte desktop hard drives,
says Bill Healy of Hitachi. Drives will grow to 2 terabytes by the end
of 2009, and to an immense 8 terabytes by the end of 2013.

Faster, Longer-Lasting Flash Memory
The next generation of flash is coming. It’s called phase-change random access memory,
and Samsung hopes it will address several drawbacks associated with
flash. Unlike flash memory, PRAM doesn’t have to be erased before new
data is written to it, which Samsung claims helps make it up to 30
times faster than conventional flash memory. It should also last ten
times longer. Samsung expects to begin producing the first 512-megabit
PRAM modules in 2008.

Instant-Charge Batteries
Ultracapacitor batteries
are lighter than existing chemical batteries, and are already being
used in hybrid vehicles. A few years down the line, the market could
see lightweight ultracapacitor batteries in laptops, cell phones, and
other portable devices.

High-Capacity Nanotube Batteries
Carbon nanotube batteries
could have ten times the capacity of existing lithium ion ones. We’re
looking forward to camera batteries that last for an entire trip, and
cell phones with battery life spans of weeks instead of days.

High-Def Video Over the Net
Higher-bandwidth connections and new compression formats (such as the H.264 format) are a double whammy that will make high-definition video over the Internet a reality. Already, some video blogs (such as RocketBoom) are offering high-definition versions of their programs, and more will be coming soon.

 WiMax in the Wild
The wireless technology WiMax has been “coming soon” for some time, but
it looks like it’s finally here: Sprint is using it as the basis for
the fourth-generation wireless data network (4G). Let’s hope the other cell phone networks follow Sprint’s lead and roll out similar services.

Cheap Mobile Data
Currently you can
get speedy mobile Internet, but it’ll cost you, as most carriers charge
$80 or more for access to their EvDO wireless data networks. That’s
going to change, though: Sprint recently announced that it soon plans
to offer services that can transfer up to 1GB of data for less than $20
a month.

Hassle-Free Handoffs
The next generation of cell phones will use both digital cell networks
and other wireless technologies (such as 802.11g). And they’ll hand off
from one type of connection to another without you knowing or caring
that they are changing over.

1000 Pages Printed per Minute

Thanks to a new printhead design dubbed JeTrix,
in a couple of years you may never again have to hang out by the laser
printer waiting for your document to finish. Instead of a small
printhead that moves back and forth across a sheet of paper, JeTrix
heads can be built as wide as the sheet, allowing for some truly
amazing output speeds.

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Filed by Ken at 12:56 pm under Technology