Top 10 tech predictions for 2010

With 2010 just around the corner, we thought we'd put together our predictions for the trends we'll see over the coming 12 months.

Laptops and netbooks: With the rapid rise of ultra-low-voltage processors in ultraportable laptops, we think netbooks will adopt dual-core versions of these chips, rather than the underpowered Intel Atom CPUs they currently use. They will also gradually become larger, with 11-12in screens and higher resolutions. The current 8.9in models with their low 1,024x600 resolutions will be phased out.

Plus, manufacturers of other IT products who have never made a computer before will produce netbooks. People who haven’t thought about buying one of the 'jelly mould' netbooks - so-called because of their near-identical looks and specifications - from 2009 might just go for one of the new models instead.

PCs: Intel's Core i3 processors will become the desktop processor of choice for most PCs. Thanks to their twin cores that support HyperThreading, they are effectively quad-core chips. Many PC monitors will also make the switch to LED backlights which, as with HD TVs (below) will reduce power consumption and should increase contrast.

Displays: 2010 will be the year of HD for the masses. Freeview HD is already being switched on, and plenty of people will rush out to buy set-top boxes (either for Freeview HD, Freesat HD, Sky or Virgin) in order to watch the World Cup in HD.

HD TVs in 2010 will quickly switch to LED backlights instead of traditional fluorescent lamps. This will reduce power consumption and bring even better contrast, since it's easy to switch LEDs on or off in the portions of the image that are light or dark. Another big trend will be internet-connected sets. BBC iPlayer will become available directly on your TV, along with other on-demand services plus limited access to websites such as YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia.

Digital cameras: Both compact and digital SLR cameras will become easier to use. Manufacturers have already hit useful resolution limits and will stop relying on high megapixel figures for their marketing campaigns. Cameras now contain a lot of processing power and a lot of this will be used to advise and inform the user rather than perform extra image processing. The video capabilities in digital cameras will begin to push camcorders out of the market. Video quality and storage capacity of modern cameras will be so good, that the idea of carrying a separate, dedicated device will be rendered pointless.

Cloud computing: Online apps also look like they’re going to become popular in 2010. Google Docs is a great example, as the benefits for consumers are immense: no need to invest in Microsoft Office, you can access your documents and calendar from any internet-connected device, plus collaborate in real-time with others on the same documents.

Security: Online criminals will target ‘cloud’ services and devices like television sets and PVRs. To most people cloud computing refers to applications that run in the web browser. Criminals will look at how they can abuse such services to steal money and other valuable resources from their victims. As internet-connected domestic electronics (such as the Cello iViewer TV and the latest PVRs) become more common, people will start to use them to bank online. Then the criminals will target these devices with viruses and other threats.

SSD uptake: Solid-state disks will become more mainstream in 2010. This will apply particularly to laptops, but also boot disks in high-end PCs. Prices of SSDs will fall thanks to better manufacturing efficiency and as prices fall, capacity will increase. 1TB SSDs are already on the horizon, meaning they have caught up with traditional hard disk capacities already.

Inkjet Printers: Inkjet printers will continue to gain ground on small colour and mono laser printers especially in small businesses, thanks to low print costs and recent increases in speed and quality. When it comes to home MFPs, we expect to see an increasing number of manufacturers using the same print and scanner engines across a range of devices, which will be differentiated by features, such as memory card readers, large touch screens, extra networking capabilities and even the ability to display RSS feeds and print photos directly from the internet. This means that you’ll be able to get same print speeds, costs and quality from printers across a range – spending more money will simply get you more bells and whistles.

Social aggregation: more mobile phones will have social aggregation software that pulls in data from multiple sites – contacts, calendars, social networking – and merges it into a unified interface, like a 'universal inbox'. The ones that succeed will be those that offer seamless merging of duplicate contacts and scan the largest range of source sites. We’ve already seen HTC’s Sense, the INQ1, Motoblur and Vodafone 360, which all ship with a particular brand of phone, and Android 2.0 will have social aggregation built in. We’ll also see 3rd party developers bringing out vendor-independent social aggregation services and software, probably on Android first.

Games: 2010 looks set to be an exciting year for new input technologies in games. Wii sales may be falling, but Microsoft and Sony will launch their own next-generation control devices. Sony’s Motion Controller is essentially a more advanced version of the Wii’s remote, but with added depth tracking and superior sensors, while Microsoft’s Project Natal uses a multiple-sensor camera to pick up actual body motions. With good support from major software publishers, both of these will help bridge the (usually painful) gap between console generations – as rumours of new hardware are bound to start soon.

And finally... just like in 2009, in 2010 no-one outside of Google will understand what on Earth Wave is for or why we should care.

Fade to grey

When it comes to photo durability and light-fastness, we found that a home photo printer is a better bet than online or high street photo printing services.

Last year, we carried out a comparative test of nine high street and online photo printing services, alongside our favourite photo printer at the time, Epson's Stylus Photo R360. HP's SnapFish online printing service was the clear winner in our blind quality tests, while Kodak's Gallery produced excellent colour prints and Jessops JPics produced the best black and white prints. The R360 didn't score too well, although its picture quality was nonetheless good enough to frame and display.

We put copies of the same photo from each service or printer up in our office window on the 20^th of October 2008. We made sure that only half of each photo was exposed to the light, to give you some idea of how they'd compare to the same photos stored out of the sun. The photos have been exposed to air and direct sunlight for 409 days – that's a little under 14 months. We were astonished by the results, which you can see below.

The Stylus Photo R360 is no longer in production, but all the printers in Epson's current Stylus Photo printers use the same Claria inks which, in combination with Epson's own-brand Premium Glossy photo paper (used in our original test), will produce comparable levels of light-fastness. None of the printing services could equal the light-fastness of the R360, but Photobox and Snapfish faded evenly, without major colour changes, which makes them the least poor of the service prints.

Here are the photos in their pristine and faded forms. Please ignore any red marks on the images - these are caused by rub-off from the magic marker we used label the photos.

Above, from left to right: Fuji Digital Image Service, BonusPrint, Snapfish, MyPix.com, PhotoBox

From left to right: Epson Stylus Photo R360, Snappy Snaps, Jessops (CeWe online), Boots (Kodak instant print), Kodak Gallery

The effects of light fading are even more obvious when you look at the pictures individually:

A: Photobox

B: MyPix.com


C: Snapfish

D: BonusPrint

E: Fuji Digital Image Service (high street franchisee)

F: Kodak Gallery

G: Boots (Kodak instant print machine)

H: Jessops (rebranded CeWe online)

I: Snappy Snaps (high street franchisee)

J: Epson Stylus Photo R360

How best to fit technology into our lives? Part 2

Last week I put up a post about how we fit technology into our lives, see here. By which I meant how we physically fit technology into our homes, when we use it and how we use it with others. This thinking was kick-started by having to reorganise my own home as my wife is expecting our first child.

This week I've been reclaiming the spare room, which for many years has been a general dumping ground for all and sundry. One unexpected side effect of this was that I had to get rid of the only remaining desktop PC in the house. This large silver tower has been largely unused for a couple of years now. As more-and-more powerful laptops entered the house, it became increasingly sidelined; eventually becoming little more than a very powerful games console.

Now, PC gaming certainly still has its place in my heart. A few years back I would have said this was due to needing a keyboard and mouse to play games properly, but my tastes have changed and now I'm happier playing most games using a joypad while sitting on a sofa. No bad thing as current high-profile game releases seem to be more-and-more aimed at console gamers, as the furore surrounding the lack of PC specific features in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has demonstrated.

It's still arguable that PC games have more depth, and the lack of platform holders like Sony or Nintendo certainly helps free developer's creativity. For me, though, the decision is largely one of comfort. I spend my whole day sitting at a desk, surrounded by monitors, using a keyboard and mouse; and so don't want to continue with the same physical posture when I get home.

With gaming now moved across to the media centre PC, more on that next week, and various games consoles, there was little reason left to mourn the loss of our last desktop. I will miss it somewhat, though, as it was easy and inexpensive to upgrade, plus having a big monitor is useful, and occasionally essential. Because of this I've kept the screen, so I can break it out and attach it to a laptop on the odd occasion I want to do some video editing. I was considering wall-mounting it at the end of the dining room table, but this apparently broke some unwritten rule of polite living in the mind of my wife, so it's tucked in a cupboard now.

One thing I won't miss about the desktop PC is that feeling of being placed out of the way in the least prepossessing room of the house. Ever since people have had home computers, they seem to have ended up in spare rooms, studies or 'dens'. Whatever you call it, you can be almost certain it's the smallest room in the house, quite likely to be the one with the least natural light, and entirely possibly the one that has never been properly decorated since you moved in.

This out-of-sight and out-of-mind situation certainly did neither PCs, nor their ardent supporters, any favours in terms of social reputation. The early home PCs, in their beige boxes with huge CRT monitors, probably didn't deserve any better treatment, aesthetically speaking at least. But it seems that once a particular activity has been assigned a specific room, then it's very hard to change, and so PCs have stayed in the spare room for decades.

Thankfully, the laptop has come to our rescue. Originally intended as a portable working device for businessmen on the go, there are now millions of such computers which rarely travel further than from the lounge to the kitchen table and maybe occasionally make the long haul upstairs to a bedroom. The distances may not be great, but the flexibility is still incredibly liberating. You can work from home on the kitchen table, browse for a movie review without leaving the sofa and even hook up your laptop to your TV to watch online TV content as a family.

At my mum's house I regularly see two or three laptops clustered on the dining room table, as everyone now has their own computer. It's amazing to think that in the last thirty years - a comparatively short a space of time - we've gone from the idea of a small number of enthusiasts owning 'Personal Computers' to every member of my immediate family having their own, truly personal, computer.

Of course this may only be common in wealthy westernised countries, but even then the power consumption and resource consumption of all these millions of personal computers, is certainly a concern. But unlike cheap commercial air travel, or eating meat as part of every meal, I think that the open and immediate access to the wealth of communication and knowledge that the internet provides is certainly something that's worth paying a hefty price for.

Webcomics (part 1)

A couple of months ago, I had to take steps to break myself of a recently resurrected serial comic book habit. It was all going so well until the X-Men series I was following got roped into Marvel's Civil War mega-crossover. I draw the line at buying The Fantastic Four to follow a plot started in another comic that I actually care about. It was a real sink-hole for my pocket money, too.

In the absence of my weekly comic book fix, I've become all the more dependant on webcomics. Fortunately, there's a lot of great content out there. My taste being what it is, please note that some of these comics contain material unsuitable for the very young.


FreakAngelsAward-winning British writer Warren Ellis's weekly webcomic, illustrated by Paul Duffield. Set in a a flooded, post-apocalyptic vision of London, FreakAngels follows a group of young people whose psychic abilities may have links to the city's devastation. Written and illustrated to an astonishingly high standard, the comic, published by Avatar Press, is also available in print form. Ellis's other professional credits include work on Hellblazer, Judge Dredd and Iron Man, as well as TV writing for Justice League Unlimited and GI Joe: RESOLUTE.




The Order of the Stick
Rich Burlew's regular strip mercilessly sends up every cliche of role-playing and fantasy fiction. It's been successful enough to spawn several hard-copy books. When I discovered it, I burned most of a weekend reading it from the beginning.
Okay, so you'll probably only get most out of this if you've played table-top RPGs at some point in your life, but the humour and plotting go far beyond gags about saving throws.

Girl Genius

If you've been taken by the (relatively) recent mainstream coverage and popularity of the steampunk movement, you might want to check out gaslamp fantasy Girl Genius, winner of this year's Hugo award for graphic fantasy. Girl Genius's alternate reality is set in "a time when the Industrial Revolution escalated into a full-on war [and] rival mad scientists are the ruling powers in most of Europe". It started life in print before making the jump to the web. With mad scientists, stunning artwork and a kick-ass heroine, there's a lot to like here.

AlertMe Energy monitoring kit is giving me OCD

Ten days ago, I installed AlertMe's Energy kit. It comprises of three items: a sensor that clamps over your electricity meter's power wire, a box of batteries that powers the sensor and sends the signal to a receiver, which is the third component, and which plugs into your broadband router. The signal is sent to AlertMe, whereupon you can view the data at AlertMe's website.

On your first visit to the site, you have to enter the code which is on the receiver unit in order for the system to know which data stream is yours. Then, after a few more configuration screens (oddly, not one to enter how much your supplier charges per kWh - you have to find this hidden-away setting on the website later), you get to the juicy part - your home's power consumption.

I didn't expect the sensor to be particularly accurate, or for the feed to be updated in real-time, but was wrong on both counts. The website's interface is clear and easy to understand. There are four icons, one which shows your current power consumption, a second displaying how much the electricity has cost you so far today, a link to graphs of previous usage and, lastly, a System link for monitoring and configuring your kit.

The most interesting, naturally, is the cost of the power used, as this gives you a hard figure for what you're paying. This is enlightening and, although I dislike the word, empowering, too. Until now, I'd had to wait for the bill to drop onto the mat every quarter to find out how much power I'd used, and therefore how many hundreds of pounds I owed for it. With the Energy kit, I could see from minute to minute how much the electricity was costing.

It may sound obvious, but although you might have an idea of which appliances use the most electricity, it's quite amazing to see concrete information on your screen which shows you not just how many watts are being used, but exactly how much this is costing. Until this information is real in your head, it's very easy to ignore it, and baulk at the bill when it arrived. The ability to view power consumption in real-time - and the cost - means you can start going about the process of cutting down your usage, and saving money in the process. (I could have lied and said I was only bothered about saving the environment, but let's face it, this is a nice bonus that comes from the motivation of having a little extra cash in your account at the end of the month.)

After the initial excitement of all this has subsided, I did a couple of tests just to see exactly what things cost. I discovered that, for example, boiling a kettle of water costs around 3p, while drying a load of washing in the tumble dryer increased the day's running total by around 30p. Testing the accuracy was easy, too, as you can the precise wattage being used by clicking on the main power meter icon. Noting the figure, which is shown to the nearest watt, I flicked on a 60W light and was amazed to see the power instantly increase by roughly that amount. Impressive stuff.

Better still, it's possible to view a graph of power use over time, so you can compare one day with another. For example, I could see two spikes of around 2kW between 12am and 6am one night, but nothing the next. Given that I'd set the dishwasher to come on during the night, I could deduce that was the source of the power consumption, particularly as I knew that it paused for around half an hour during its economy cycle.

AlertMe's graphs aren't particularly easy to see, as the line graphs are too detailed. Fortunately, AlertMe has partnered with Google to send the data to its new PowerMeter gadget. This means you can see a usage graph directly on your iGoogle homepage. PowerMeter shows area graphs, which are far easier on the eye. You can view the data by Day, Week or Month, with the latter two showing bar graphs to make it easier to compare overall power usage.

You can enter the cost of your electricity and currency, as well as view your current usage compared to a budgeted amount, so you can see, for example, if your usage is above or below last week's. I'm convinced that PowerMeter's 'Compared to others' graph is broken, though. For the last ten days, it's been showing my average usage as the same as a 1-bed apartment. Given I live in a 4-bed house, this can't be right, as I'm not that frugal.

However, this I'm a little worried that AlertMe's kit is giving me (and my wife, for that matter) OCD tendencies. Ever since I installed the kit, we've had the laptop signed in to AlertMe's website, constantly keeping a check on the power meter and current cost. We've even been turning lights off in every room except the ones we're in to see how much money it saves, and boiling only the amount of water we need, rather than a full kettle every time. That may be slightly laughable, or maybe we should view this frugality as obvious money-saving tactics we should have been employing all along.

Thus far, I'm uncertain whether this £70 kit is good value. On the one hand, it gives you information that's otherwise a mystery, such as the frightening amount of 'permanent' power being used by all those devices that remain on constantly like clock radios, PVRs, house alarms, fridges, freezers etc. On the other, though, is it going to enable to me to save any more money than I could by simply turning things off when I don't need them? That's a question I hope to answer in a month or two, when I discover whether we can use less power in December without resorting to ridiculous measures like trying to dry washing on radiators, or living in the dark.

It's like reading, but better

Like most children of the 1980s, I was raised on a nutritious cultural diet of MTV and video games. Naturally, this means I have a blissfully short attention span and I am easily distracted. Before I forget who you are and what I'm writing about or I rush away to gaze at the pandas grazing outside my window, I should point out that I'm not some illiterate chav. I love reading and the Web is full of interesting stuff to read from acres of news at Google News to the free, public domain books at Project Gutenberg. Unfortunately, reading a lot of content available on the Web is a royal pain.

A lot of content available to read online is free, but this is only made possible by advertising. Unfortunately, some websites are littered with lots of ads which clutter up the page. Chances are, they're also very distracting since a lot of them are animated and will run in a perpetual loop. Obviously, that content might not be free without advertising, but that doesn't give advertisers free reign to induce an epileptic fit when I'm least expecting it.

On top of it all, a lot of text online is poorly laid out in small, badly chosen fonts. I could just give up and read a magazine or a book, but that would be defeatism and if Margaret Thatcher and endless re-runs of The Mysterious Cities of Gold have taught me anything, it's that stubbornness always pays off in the end.

Readability is a handy little Javascript applet that makes websites much easier to read. Once you've chosen the page layout, font size and margin size to suit you at the Readability webpage, an applet is generated that is stored in your browser's bookmarks toolbar. When you come across a visually offensive webpage that you nonetheless want to read, just click the Readability icon in your toolbar and the webpage is instantly reformatted into a far more readable form. If you want to see the original layout, just reload the page.

As my pictured example shows, the reformatted page can be a vast improvement over the original. Readability doesn't always work, especially on particularly complex webpage layouts, but it's a handy tool to have nonetheless and is quicker and more convenient than using ad blockers and manually resizing text.

Now that I've solved that little quandary, I'd like to move onto my proposed solution for the long-standing animosity between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Oss… OMG! PANDAZ GRAZING OUTSIDE MY WINDOW!!!!1111111

How best to fit technology into our lives?

As someone who writes about technology for a living I obviously put more thought into my home's IT and digital entertainment set up than most people. Despite this, it's easy to fall into a pattern of use that's far from ideal. In fact it's far too easy to get caught up in the 'what' of computing, that being the empirical facts and capabilities of the technology, while sidelining the equally critical why, where and how.

To put it another way there are far more important factors when using a PC than what processor and operating system you use, or even which search engine and online news provider you prefer. Given the choice, do you like to sit at a desk when you browse the internet? Or are you happier plonked on the sofa? Do you prefer to work in the privacy of a study? But the dining room table is your only choice? Do you think that games must be played with a keyboard and mouse? Or do you prefer a joypad but simply can't get a decent stint on the living room TV.

Most of us live with one or more people, and so these questions come about by how those others like to use and enjoy the wealth of digital information and entertainment available to us. Long gone are the days of a single PC in the study (tethered to a modem) and a single TV in the living room (with just a handful of channels and a VCR). We now have far more flexibility with laptops, on-demand TV, wireless Ethernet and media streaming devices. It's not uncommon for every member of some households to have their own laptop, but at the same time we'd be loathed to entirely give up on shared experiences, like gathering round the living room TV to watch a favourite programme or look at some holiday snaps.

The technology is good – with the usual nod of sympathy to those in rural areas who struggle to get decent broadband connections – it's now a matter of how effectively we fit it into our day to day lives. This is much harder to advise upon than say the best laptop display, or the fastest desktop processor.

Adapting new forms of technology to work with our endlessly varied family dynamics and antiquated living spaces isn't going to produce a one-size fits all solution. However, over the next few weeks, as I reorganise my own limited living space to accommodate a child, I'm going to also try and cast some light on the issue.