The future can be unwritten, but it isn’t entirely unknown. We glance at nine areas of innovation and upcoming products to look at in 2014.
Predictions about what is going to come seldom prove accurate. That’s why prognosticators pick trends, instead of specific events. Witness Gartner’s recent top 10 strategic technology trends for 2014. It correctly identifies areas of active innovation, including 3D printing, the extension of the web to everyday objects, and smart machines. Nevertheless it fails to supply enough guidance to pick out specific winners from an investment standpoint.
Even when market seers stick to broad strokes, they frequently go wrong. For years, people have fretted about peak oil — the notion that global oil production will hit a peak after which diminish. In theory, it is sensible. Oil supply is proscribed, and the quantity we extract each year cannot continue growing forever. But peak oil doomsayers got the timing wrong. It was presupposed to happen within the 1990s, after which within the following decade. But it surely didn’t, attributable to fracking and other technological advances in oil extraction. And relating to predicting the longer term, timing is everything.
Predictions work better when there’s less guesswork involved. The science fiction writer William Gibson once observed, “The longer term is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Sometimes we will see into the long run because it’s already visible somewhere inside the present.
Here are about a technologies and products that we all know are coming. What continues to be seen is whether or not and the way they’ll change things.
Google Glass
Google Glass must be available to consumers in 2014. Whether anyone will buy it remains open to discuss. But before you dismiss Glass with some remark about “Glassholes,” consider Google+ and Google Chromebooks. Both were derided as jokes after they debuted. Google+ was seen as a pale imitation of Facebook, and Chromebooks were dismissed for being unable to run Microsoft Office and for his or her modest computational prowess.
Today, Google+ commands some respect, partly because Google forced it on everyone. Chromebooks at the moment are selling and may work with Office documents throughout the company’s Quickoffice integration, let alone Google Apps. Google can be ruthless about killing its products, but it is usually willing to sustain strategically valuable ones.
[What number sensor-equipped, networked devices are in your shopping list this year? Read Internet Of factors Meets Holiday Wish Lists.]
Google Glass is only that: It matters to Google because mobile computing is the long run. We all know that because mobile computing, wearable or otherwise, keeps expanding inside the present. We’ve computers and sensors that communicate with them in increasingly more everyday accessories, appliances, structures, and vehicles. We’re going to have computers in glasses, too. But we do not yet know what applications will prove useful for every form factor or who will use the applications.
In the case of Glass, Google’s cautious rollout has began to suggest how computerized eyewear might matter. The recently introduced Glass app Word Lens translates printed words using the Glass camera in real-time.
Think in regards to the utility of having the ability to read foreign languages through your glasses instantaneously. If Google made a version of Glass that did that and offered it for a couple of hundred dollars, it’d be an immense hit among travelers.
Wireless charging
Wires are keeping the mobile revolution tied to the bottom. No person really wants them, but they haven’t proven easy to eliminate. The technology industry has made some progress in that direction through wireless technology. Wireless data protocols like AirPlay and Bluetooth have reached a degree where physical cables are not any longer necessary for good audio, let alone streaming video.
Power cords, however, are still typical. Apple has danced across the issue for it slow by combining multiple cables right into a single one on its monitors and making power cords easier to take away through its MagSafe technology. But Microsoft and Nokia have forged ahead and cut the ability cord, repeating a feat Palm accomplished in 2009. The Lumia Windows Phone 820 and 920, introduced in 2012, made wireless charging widely available. The technology has since proliferated within the type of Qi wireless chargers, which support more and more mobile devices. Expect Apple to have a solution for this eventually.
The next year should bring improved wireless charging time from Sony and a more desirable charging system from Samsung and the brand new Zealand startup PowerbyProxi. Eventually, this technology will spread to other devices. Mobee already offers an inductive charger for Apple’s Magic Mouse. Developments in 2014 will hasten the cutting of cords. In many years, power cords will look antiquated, not less than for mobile devices.
Curved smartphones
Samsung has already released a curved smartphone, the Galaxy Round, and LG has just done a similar with its G Flex. Bloomberg has reported that Apple is operating on phones with curved displays, for possible release within the third quarter of 2014.
Expect more curved phones, but don’t ask why, because there’s not really a terrific answer. In its assessment of the Galaxy Round, Engadget said the device is comfortable to hang and feels comfortable in a gasp pocket. A minor advantage, perhaps, though hand fit may be addressed by avoiding large-screen phones, and pants usually are not the best place to hold phones. Screen curvature really isn’t a giant deal unless you’re lining up several phones to construct a tiny aqueduct or using one as a gutter to roll Raisinets into your mouth.
As a trend, curved phones matter mainly because they represent an effort to think outside the box, that is to claim the oblong form factor. Curved phones are an indication of what is to come back: phones in wristbands, phones that fold, etc. They’ll bounce back.
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