2011 will be another year of firsts. There will be the first 3DTV that does not require glasses. The Nintendo 3DS, the first 3D handheld console. The iPhone 5, while not strictly the first, will be innovative. In addition to all this there will be innovation after innovation throughout the year.
As a bit of a gadget geek, I follow the latest in TVs, consoles, PC peripherals, and PC hardware with the heightened awareness of what might come next. First of all, let’s take the Nintendo 3DS. It’s going to take the portable gaming genre by storm. Not only is it the first portable 3D console, but it also doesn’t require any additional equipment to get the most out of it. There will be many games made for it over the next 12 months and many of these games will be created specifically to take advantage of the 3D display.
Next comes the iPhone 5. The rumor mill is already happily making the rounds with the latest rumors about what Apple may or may not include in this next update. Hopefully it’s fully tested and the infamous signal issues from the iPhone 4 launch aren’t present on this one. Memory, camera, and the operating system in general are likely to improve. Many believe that they can include expandable memory slots, but I think this is just a rumor.
Others say that the iPad 2 will come out this year with expandable memory and USB ports to allow for expansion from the iPad to a tablet. It is also rumored that the iPad 2 will have a front and rear facing camera in order to take advantage of Apple’s fantastic Facetime video calls.
And finally we move on to PC hardware and peripherals. I think this year we will see a lot of people opting for touchscreen PCs. With the arrival of Windows 7 in 2010, which allows touchscreen devices to work with the operating system, manufacturers have been busy creating a multitude of hardware to go along with it. With prices set to fall this year, I think touch screen monitors will become commonplace in UK homes this year.
Then we have the Sandy Bridge processors, which in itself is one of the biggest advances for the CPU in a few years. After the boom of the early 2000s, CPU progress seemed to slow down a bit, although all cores were added to give better multitasking performance, actual clock speeds didn’t increase much. Sandy Bridge processors put an end to that with built-in Turbo Boost technology that allows you to overclock the CPU without any knowledge and the processors run so fast that they will soon outperform the AMD and Intel chips of yesteryear.
These are my thoughts on the way technology is evolving in 2011. What do you think?