Shaun’s Technology Predictions in 5 years time

Had sometime, so I guess I got kinda carried away typing up a “short post” on technology changes I would expect in years to come, the end result is this post.

Looking back, technology had really progressed amazingly fast over the years, not to mention price downs as well. I still remembered having paid $75 for a 4MB memory stick back in 2000, the equivilant for that price now is a 4GB SD card or 1000 times the storage capacity. Man! technology now, tomorrow’s old. With that I here is my predictions for technology in Singapore in about 5 years time:

Lifestyle Changes, Trends & Gadgetery specifics

• Infra-red protocol will replaced mainstream by wireless Bluetooth protocols hitting at least 1Mbps
• USB charging will be the mainstream format for consumer gadgets
• Most households can have the option for additonal 2 USB ports per power socket for charging purposes
• 10 Megapixel camera phones will be the norm, on top of 20MP Digital cameras with HD Video recording norm
• The fine line between MP3 Players, PDAs & Ultra-portable PCs (UMPCs) will fade. In preference for All-In-One computing ultraportables
• Petrol Kiosks will have Hybrid car replaceable batteries as standard & so are selected LPG topup hotspots
• People will start being arrested for trying to use their Stove LPGs to power their Natural Gas Cars
• Your air-conditional, stove, blender or even toaster may come Wi-fi “ready/enabled” and able to be remote controlled globally
• LCD screens will be so cheap to produce, its cheaper than their CRT counterparts (as presently) & will be used in many structural aspects from static, bus to taxi advertising
• OLED/OLCD & Hi-Colour 64-bit LCDS will take the new luxury center stage as Plasmas/LCDs today.
• >200″ LCD screen manufactured (100″ Current) used in low power immersive billboards/projector alternative
• Digital Wi-Fi radio will start forming its root on the Wi-Max network, with radio stations named after their ip address (e.g Power Radio 202.14.168) instead of the frequencies (e.g 91.3FM)
• Car radios, Hi-Fi sets and radios will have media card slots as norm.

Mobile Devices

• Your phone can have 1 ringtone for GSM calls, 1 for SMS, 1 for VoIP, 1 for Email, 1 for MSN & 1 for Bluetooth device discovery
• Fixed Line phones & GSM will be phased out in cities using Wi-Max in favour of VoIP (2010 islandwide Wi-fi)
• VoIP is preferred over GSM, with more multimedia capabilities and lower subscription costs.
• You handphone will have as much processing power than your PC now
• Handphones have subwoofers built-in
• Bluetooth stereo headphones, mics hits mainstream

Storage

• Record companies start selling CDs and DVD in smaller flash media (e.g SD cards) with copyright hardware protection
• Classic Full Size Memory Formats (e.g full sized SD, MS stick, etc) will be phased in preference for the smaller format which is the norm.
• Mainstream consumer flash memory cards hits at least 32-64GB regions for CF (first) & SDHC ranges
• Tape & DVD based video camcorders will suffer the same fate as film based ones, in favour for onboard harddisks/flash memory/removable memory, etc
• Harddisks reach 2TB in size with 32MB Cache
• 500GB SolidState harddrives released

Computer hardware

• 1st 100% Flash based mainstream laptop launched with 128GB flash harddrive offering instant on/boot.
• You can power your portable devices using water
• Standalone Laptop battery life hits the 24hour mark
• There will be a new DIY market for notebooks (barebooks) as notebook becomes more modular.
• Desktop single card Quad/Oct GPUs will be favoured over physical Dual/Quad SLI graphics solutions.
• Graphics Memory capacity Hits 4GB as standard with 64-bit processors mainstream
• 8-16 core CPUs will be mainstream with memory speeds hitting at least 2Ghz – 3Ghz, processors at least 5Ghz with more thermal & calculative efficiencies per watt & gigahertz.
• Mice will have as much optical/laser resolution & tracking accuracy as a 10 Megapixel DSLR Today.
• Multifunction scan/copy/print printers will take the norm stage, standalone scanners faced out.
• The standard household printer can print photographs as fine as any high-quality photo lab currently.
• “Backlight Kits” will be offered mainstream to consumers who wants to replace their LCD backlights >50,000hrs
• 64-bit computing is the norm accepted standard

Woot that’s alot of technology for one day, hold it cowboy!