tech trends for 2013 - 29th dec 2012 article

"For example, the humble Blu-ray player. While it is too soon to write it off, you’ll find that people will decide to stream movies more often via a service such as BigPond or Quickflix rather than go to their local video store and hire a DVD."

http://www.live4.com.au/tech-trends-for-2013/

Tech trends for 2013

by Charlie Brown

What can we expect in the world of technology in the year ahead?

2012 will go down as the Year of the Phablet – a horrible word, and one that I hope will disappear from the technology lexicon sooner rather than later – and the Ultrabook.

As the name suggests, a phablet is a cross between a phone and tablet, and it’s a market that vendors were more than happy to exploit as they looked to synchronise technologies and meld them into one homogenous product. The Ultrabook was also a hybrid that was championed by Intel to spruik its ‘i’ range of processors, with new Windows 8 devices even having the ability to turn from a tablet into a laptop and vice versa.

And what about 2013? Next year will see an ever-decreasing market share for your desktop PC, trying to stay anonymous will become a challenge and a plethora of interactive and augmented reality applications will start appearing on the scene.

However, the one thing that I think will have the biggest impact on our everyday lives is the smart television – not so much the content, which is a given, but the peripheral devices that connect to the unit. For example, the humble Blu-ray player. While it is too soon to write it off, you’ll find that people will decide to stream movies more often via a service such as BigPond or Quickflix rather than go to their local video store and hire a DVD.

While the demise of the Blu-ray player won’t gain much momentum in the next 12 months, I can see the biggest casualty being the personal video recorder, or PVR. At present, it makes sense to use the PVR to record different programmes on different channels, but this function will be carried out by plugging a storage device into your smart television and storing all your programmes to a hard drive, or even the cloud. This will make the device redundant.

Next in the firing line could be the gaming console. Manufacturers would disagree, but I don’t think it will be too far away before games are completely immersed in your television – I can see a device similar to the Xbox Kinect being built into your unit with the camera acting as a body sensor.

I can also see people quite willing to shell out $5 or $10 for a new game or app, rather than buying a new console. This doesn’t mean the demise of the likes of Sony Entertainment or Microsoft’s gaming division either – they’ll just become more games-focused and they’ll still have their PS Network and Xbox Live services too.

An example is how Samsung made a splash when it added the Angry Birds app to its latest range of smart televisions, including the ability to play the game using the television’s gesture control technology.

Televisions are becoming more powerful, with dual-core and soon-to-be-quad-core processors, so they will be able to play app games that cost far less than a disk-based game on your game console.

Add these factors to the already internet-capable, Skype-viable and app-intensive smart television, and it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see how these types of integration are going to be popular in the coming 12 months.

And what else do I see happening next year? One of the biggest revolutions will be the proliferation of devices that are 4G enabled, which has been talked about ad infinitum over the past three or four years, but 2013 will be the year where there will be a huge uptake in the spectrum. Driving the growth of 4G will be the number of devices that come on the market, and the needs and wants of people who need the speed offered by the spectrum to enhance their personal and professional lives.

Add to this most telcos offering same-for-same pricing for moving from 3G to 4G networks, and users will find new applications being used on their handset that take advantage of this bandwidth. It will be interesting to see if the telcos will be able to handle the expected uptake.

Overall I see 2013 very much where 2012 has left off – vendors meeting, and sometimes exceeding, the demands of a public’s insatiable appetite for technology. Will there be a totally new and revolutionary product? You bet. But all that will begin in January with the 2013 Consumer Electronic Show.