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.