Everything about computing, at home, at work or while on the road is all set to change drastically as a host of technological changes are taking place all round us. Blindingly fast chips or may be the flexible display or the way the electronics is cooled through nanotubes are the changes that are imminent. Changes in technology around us are happening at an increasing rate and is going to affect all aspects of our already hectic life.
Innovations are coming thick and fast. Tabletops charging up your laptop or a wall mounted Pc that recognizes not only your face but your hand gestures too is no more science fiction but technologies that are ready to break into real life products. Pockettable devices will emerge to miniaturize devices that could not fit into a briefcase earlier, a projector, a printer are close enough. Next generation internet technologies are going to change everything from the TV to the refrigerator is on the way. Ever faster processing building blocks happening is a phenomenon that is already upon us. Multiple cores, denser and denser hard drives, there’s already a terabyte drive on the market, is a trend that is so evident.
We take a look at some major innovations, one that is just round the corner and then some that’ll probably arrive by the year 2012. The future is actually here!
Kiss Your Power Cord Good-Bye
Wireless charging is close to reality. No more fiddling with bulky adaptor nor the long tailed wires/cables that go with them. Just keeping the item to be charged near a power source will accomplish the battery charging quite easily.
What is it ?
There are two ways this is being pursued. Inductive charging methods couple power from the power source inductively to the electromagnetic field of the device to be charged. Conductive charging in contrast allows power to be transferred when two surfaces are in contact. Either way you’d simply put your laptop, mobile and such other devices on a universal charging pad and the devices will feed on th energy being doled out from the charging pad.
When is it coming ?
Both the technologies are expected to emerge into the market by next year. WildCharge expects to have it out somewhere around the 2008 with the first conductive charging notebook product. eCoupled meanwhile is pushing to get its inductive technology into cars, countertops and desk surfaces by 2009. By 2010 wireless charging should be commonplace with major laptop and mobile vendors joining the move.
Print From Anywhere (And Anything)
Look for next generation mobile devices to come with mobile printers. Today, if you need a print of your photos, you make a quick dash home or order on-line! That may be in the past very soon.
Zink of zero ink imaging, a spin-off of Polaroid is creating new ways of making photo paper. Zink paper has a crystal substrate sandwiched between its layers that colorizes when passed through a slim printer. The printers themselves will become so small that they would nestle in your pocket or become part of the laptop and other mobile devices quite easily.
By 2008 Zink is planning to partner with a camera major and first digital cameras with built in printers be out in the market. Prints are likely to be only2×3 inches at this time. The company is also planning to start selling a printer for camera phones for probably $99. Another2 or 3 years and the technology gets integrated to laptops & assorted mobile devices.
Great Graphics Inside
“Integrated graphics” Built in graphics, built into the processor/processor board, has been equated with sluggish operations. Not any more, new CPUs are coming with truly powerful graphics built in.
AMD acquired ATI, the graphics specialists and that brought the rivalry with Intel to a new level. Both of them are working on bridging this gap intensely by building graphics processing capabilities onto the main processor. This saves a lot of time in transferring data between the CPU and the GPU over the system bus. Direct X 10 support and acceleration between Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be on-chip too. Designed for low power consumption it will save board real estate and are going to perform significantly better than today’s graphics adapters.
Intel plans to productionize its integrated chips, nicknamed Nehalem in 2008. Initially they will be a set of server chips. AMD plans to release its Puma line for laptops about the same time. Nehalem should be reaching desktops and notebooks by 2009 while Puma will be in the desktops by 2010.
Screens Get The Bends
Devices have been getting smaller and ever more powerful. Which made them more difficult to use, particularly the tiny displays were a major handicap. What if you could roll out a large display when at work be it at a hotel, home or the workplace! That retains best of both worlds features; remain mobile yet get the ease of use of a large display surface. That’s what polymer based flexible displays are going to do.
LCD displays that are a sandwich of glass surfaces with a layer of liquid crystals gives us a thin display already. But they are not flexible and shatters easily. Electronic paper or a thin layer of organic LEDs sandwiched between layers of polymers is going to give us that flexibility. So much so, that the ePaper can be rolled up really tight. E ink and Philips have been working on the medium for a while now. This is going to be cheaper and easier to manufacture than the LCD panels of today. Manufacturing will mean simply printing on the display layer on the plastic film directly!
While the first version is not have the desired flexibility yet, they are into products already. Sony Reader($300) and Motorola Motofone F3 ($130) have the E Paper displays on them. First truly rollable displays from Polymer Vision the Phillips spin off reaches the market in 2008. Telecom Italia is going to incorporate the first rollable displays. This is going to be a 5 inch 320×240 pixels mono display unit but by 2010, Polymer Vision expects to start selling a color display with more resolution.
[via PC World]
