10 Types Of People

Now, it’s about this time of the year that I decide to ramble on about what I think will be the big tech news over the next 12 months. Most of the time, I get it wrong, and actually more recently I’ve gotten incredibly boring and pointless with my predictions. So, this will hopefully be a bit more interesting, a bit more interesting, probably completely wrong still (I don’t have an issue with that) but just a bit fun as well.

The problem with predictions, is that people tend to predict the obvious. Like the BBC “prediction” that the comet next year may show up, or may not. That isn’t a prediction, that’s just stating a fact. The other ones are just extrapolation. Eg…a new iPhone next year. I admit that this has mainly been my issue in the past as well. But this time it shall hopefully be a bit more interesting, but this will also mean that it will be incredibly wrong. Probably. We shall revisit these this time next year.

• A new xBox will be announced at E3.

Ok, I immediately broke my own rule. This one really is pretty obvious. Sony and Microsoft have been playing chicken for the last 12-18 months. They both already have their current ideal console ready to announce, tweak a bit, and then release. The issue is that they want to wait until the other one announces first. Because then they can tweak theirs, make it slightly better than the other and they have the best console on the market. The issue is, that with this strategy, they will very quickly be obsolete, as it is probably 2012′s technology released in 2014. The issue with consoles yet again…

• Amazon open physical store

I’ve said this one before. And I’ll say it again. I may have the year wrong, but this *will* happen. And I mean very soon. I think it’ll be sooner than most of you think. It’ll be in the US, and it’ll be a cross between an Apple shop and a car showroom. It’ll have a number of products that you can go in to physically look at. I’m not sure what will be in it. Probably the more popular items. Maybe focusing on electronics? I’m not sure. But, mark my words, this *will* happen.

• Microsoft will buy Nokia.

Ok, this one is probably a bit far-fetched. For this year anyway. But this is what will happen with these guys. Nokia will continue to lose value, Microsoft will buy Nokia, Ballmer will retire, Stephen Elop will be the new Microsoft CEO, and Microsoft begin to do an “Apple”. They realise they need the hardware of Nokia, and want to own it all. In fact, they have already realised this. It’s been said before, but it’s funny that it’s an ex-Microsofty that took over Nokia right before they went Microsoft and started nose diving. Ok, that’s unfair, they were nose diving before he took over. But he didn’t help.

Just remember this…Nokia’s market cap is $14M. Microsoft have about $50M in cash/cash equivalents.

• The first waterproof phone

That’s right. Waterproof. Not just water-resistant. Or splash-proof. Waterproof. The first waterproof smart phone will be released in 2013. Probably near the end of the year, and either by Samsung or LG. It’ll be the biggest feature they talk about with it, and it’ll be basically like this year’s phones but waterproof. We know this technology exists, we saw it last year at CES, but there have been no hints since then about anything including it. I think 2013 is the year.

• Colour Kindle
  

When Amazon released the Kindle Fire, and Barnes and Noble released their tablet as well…people seemed to forget about colour e-readers. I think 2013 is the year of the colour e-reader. We shall have at least 1 released. I think tablets from e-reader companies are just a stop-gap. I think they want a colour, high-refresh rate e-ink device, and I think someone will release one this year. It may not be Amazon, and it won’t be high refresh rate enough to watch videos yet, but it’ll come.

• Intel announce first ARM device

Not a crazy prediction. It’s been predicted before, or should I say rumoured. But I think there is a lot of interest in this. Especially as their own phone processors have gone nowhere so far.

• A new social network

Someone will announce a new social network. It will be free, but not have ads. How will they make money? By corporate sponsors. Basically, individuals (and charities) will get free accounts, but companies will have to pay to get onto it. Yes, they will have to pay for your nice free social network to get access to you. And what do you get in return? A nice, free, social network with no ads. Sound nice? Well, it’s a shame it’ll fail pretty badly. It won’t last till 2015.

• Yahoo build new search engine

Yahoo need a big thing. This is it. Not just a rehashing of Google, Bing, or old Yahoo. But a completely new way to search. I don’t know what this will look like, but that’s why I’m not building it. I just think they will release it this year to massive fanfair. It’ll be integrated into Flickr quite heavily, and together they will be heralded as the rebirth of Yahoo.

• Blackberry OS 10 isn’t a fail

Ok, it looks exactly like Android or iOS, but it finally catches up to the times and this stems the blockage of people going away from it. Don’t believe me? Just talk to a Blackberry fan. They are the most loyal customers I’ve ever seen. Even more loyal than Apple’s. Apple’s are sticking around because it keeps getting better. Blackberries are pretty much the same as they were 5 years ago. They are all staying around because they want something to believe in from RIM. They are begging for something new to buy with the blackberry logo on it.

It may not create much growth in their company, but it’ll stop the shrinkage, which is all the can hope for just now.

• Google Glassless

This one is part extrapolation, part wild speculation, part repeating what I’ve said for a while. I’ve been wanting this for ages. Augmented Reality contact lenses. It’s the next step, I just never realised there would be a step before it. I didn’t see Google Glass coming. But I have been saying for ages that the contact lenses will be coming. The main reason I think they’ll come quite quickly? People don’t want to wear something ridiculous looking like Google Glass.

p.s I never realised how hard it would be to think of my predictions without extrapolation. Most of what I thought of technically was. And even after all that work, I failed as a few did include it.

Now, it’s about this time of the year that I decide to ramble on about what I think will be the big tech news over the next 12 months. Most...

First of all, happy new year .

Second of all, you may be reading this thinking “Man alive, this is quite late for the predictions.” and yes, you will be right, the 3rd year running I have done predictions, and its the first that I have posted them after the first few hours of Jan 1st (UTC). I am a failure, I apologise. More than 24 hours late, but ahhh well..

Anyways, last years predictions were, lets say debatable at best. But partly because they were so vague. This year may be better, may be as bad, let us see. I will do my review of last years 1 in a few days, but I wanted to get this years ones out first.

1. There will be at least 1 upgrade to either ps3, 360 or wii at E3. Most likely will be the wii, as I think it is the 1 most needing an upgrade. We haven’t heard any rumours yet, but that makes this one more fun. PS3 will hopefully not, as it should have a long time left in it as we haven’t reached its potential yet (and I’ve only had 1 for a year…) 360 will probably get 1 next year.
2. Google TV will have its Hero moment (arguably the point when android on phones became properly usable for everyday users). It will have a couple of upgrades, and actually start to be usable by normal people. This will then cause people to buy it, and make it useful and fun.
3. We will drown in tablets and e-readers. The first colour e-reader will be released, and this will be kinda rubbish, cause the refresh rate will still be pretty crap. Better devices will not be released until 2012 (probably until after an Apple colour ereader, an i-nk-pad perhaps?).
4. The Notion Ink Adam will be released?
5. New ipad, iphone and ipod touch (pretty obvious…) No macbooks this year though. They seem to be going off macbooks and releasing them with more than 1 year gap. They will slowly be turned into the ipad with a keyboard.
6. Windows 8 will be announced, but will not be released till either the end of 2012, or beginning of 2013, but they will say beginning of 2012. It will look exactly the same, but will have great “security” features. Including, but not limited to, something “unhackable” and also a new “uncrackable” activation code system, that they seem to spend a lot of time on…
7. Commercially available 4K tv. People start to hear about it, forget about 3D. Although, people will continue to say that the number of pixels I have just now is fine, thank you very much. But they will buy one eventually anyways…
8. Android 2.4 and 3.0 will be released within the year.
9. Canonical will continue alienating people and projects, and will continue on its mission to mac-ify the Linux desktop.
10. Hulu will get off their backside and start their UK service. People celebrate…

Feel free to agree, disagree, moan, shout at me, tell me I’m getting boring, whatever. Thats what the comments form is for I think I’ve found a middle ground between outlandishly crazy, and boringly predictable.

First of all, happy new year . Second of all, you may be reading this thinking “Man alive, this is quite late for the predictions.” and yes, you will be...

This is just a quick post to moan about people talking about Rovio’s problems with Android fragmentation. This is a load of rubbish, it is nothing new with computers.

First, here is a link – http://engt.co/hDj6o1

Ok, so what they are saying is that people can’t run it because their phones are too slow. Well, first of all this is true with iPhones as well. Ever tried angry birds on an iPhone 1 or 3? Man alive, its slow. Its terribly slow. So, it clearly isn’t just an Android problem.

Second of all, it is something that happens with computers. Period. Every bought a game? Realised that it has minimum system requirements? Yeah…computer games have always had this. If you build something that is heavy on system resources, or has a lot of graphics and gameplay, it will not run on everything!!! For goodness sake, stop heralding this as a big company admitting that there is Android fragmentation. It really isn’t such a big problem, we just need to make sure games run on phones before you release on them.

Thats it…nothing huge.

This is just a quick post to moan about people talking about Rovio’s problems with Android fragmentation. This is a load of rubbish, it is nothing new with computers. First,...

I understand that the Google people have many more important things to be doing, but personally I feel this is part of Google’s problem. I have been trying to find out about the “history” of android. About when previous android releases were announced, and the source code was released, the gaps between them, and trying to figure out when we could possibly see 2.3/3.0 because of that. I know this isn’t a science, but it is fun anyway.

As far as I can see, there is no “History” page, and the only page dedicated to android releases hasn’t been updated since 1.5 (android.com/releases). The easiest way for me to find this information is using wikipedia:

1.0: 21/10/2008

1.1: 09/02/2009

1.5: 30/04/2009

1.6: 15/09/2009

2.0: 26/10/2009

2.1: 12/01/2010

2.2: 20/05/2010

By my calculations, this would set 2.3 to be released …goodness knows. There seems to be no pattern at all. Thats rubbish. It should be between tomorrow and january.

This is not the point of this post however, the point is that Google need to keep their webpages up to date. Need to have a “history of android” page or something. But noone at Google would ever think about this as they are a company of engineers, as many people have said before.

This is Google’s main problem, thinking about the normal things, the simple things, the little things.

I understand that the Google people have many more important things to be doing, but personally I feel this is part of Google’s problem. I have been trying to find...

You may know that I recently got a new phone. Specifically an HTC desire. It runs android, specifically android 2.2, and I will be reviewing it and a few apps over the coming weeks and months. For just now, I’m going to talk about a little product on my phone that I use every day. Even if I don’t consciously use it, it still runs. It is called “Google Listen”.

Google listen is a podcatcher. Most of you should know what one of those are, but just incase you don’t, I’m going to tell you. A podcast is a constantly updating list of audio files (ok, thats not quite right, but it is a simple explanation of it) that are posted on the internet and you can download them. Many people use a desktop client to download podcasts, and then sync them to their media device. However another, possibly simpler, solution is to have an application on your phone, and with the dawning of phones that are very powerful, constantly connected to the internet and allow third party apps, this is a great idea. Google listen is one such application.

When you open google listen, you are presented with 4 options. “My listen items”, “My Subscriptions”, “Popular Searches” and “Recently played”. You can add feeds by going to “My subscriptions” and adding a feed, or by searching their database. I find that their podcast database is very lacking. I found stuff like TWiT shows, and Linux Outlaws, but not UbuntuUKPodcast or thecommandline podcast. If they get their database properly up and with a lot of shows on it, this would be a huge plus for it and give it a huge edge over the competition.

Once you have a feed added listen will constantly search it for new additions to it and will automatically download them. You can turn this off in the settings, or tell it to only do it on wifi. This is a huge plus, the fact that it automatically refreshes and downloads them. You will forget to check the feed every so often, and walk out the house and go “aw…I forgot to download that podcast”. I used to do that with my old Nokia 5800 before.This is not a problem when it happens automatically.

A downside to this automatic is that it can’t handle losing network connectivity. If you are trying to download it and it loses signal you have to restart it manually, and occaisionally it won’t ever download the podcast (this only happened once to me, but it is a problem). It is very uncommon, but still not good.

It has problems with the notifications it has, and when it shows it. When I pause my music app, it sometimes shows in the notification bar as playing, which is quite annoying, and the only way to get it away is to play and then stop again. It also seems to steal the “play/pause” button from my bluetooth headphones. I do not know whether this is because my music app can’t handle them or whether google listen is taking them and not letting anyone else have them. Either way, I need to find out what this is and fix it, because it is quite annoying.

There isn’t much else to talk about this app. Apart from the fact that there is only 1 way to automatically delete episodes, and that is by saying how many downloads it can have. After it hits the limit, it deletes the oldest episode. This is a problem if you occasionally don’t listen to podcasts, and you end up having a lot of unlistened episodes. This is 1 thing I would like them to have.

The other thing to mention is that this is beta software. It is prone to bugs, and for that reason if you are worried about that do not use it.

If you are happy with using non-stable software, then I would recommend this app. I have tried many podcatchers (desktop and mobile) and this is the best. It is automatic, it is simple, you can forget about it, and it treats podcasts as different from music. Music players never do podcasts justice. Google Listen does. It does simple things like save the point that you last played it at, that normal music players don’t do, that just makes a whole huge amount of difference. I would highly recommend this app to anyone who is happy with using beta software.

You may know that I recently got a new phone. Specifically an HTC desire. It runs android, specifically android 2.2, and I will be reviewing it and a few apps...

Ok, some of you may remember I put down my 10 predictions for the coming year. Well, a few of them have come true. Lets see…

2. Apple won’t wait till Christmas to release their new Iphone, which is what they said they will do. – Turns out I was right with this one. They have released the iPhone 3Gs already, halfway through the year
5. I will get my computer working again. – This one did happen, but I didn’t update you with it. I got my money back for my old motherboard, and bought a new one.
6.Google will release 2 more versions of their G range of phones, taking as long to release the source code as they did with the first version. – Turns out this one is right as well, with the release today of the HTC Hero
7. Canonical will make an increasingly stupid name for version 9.10 of Ubuntu. Kranky Kangaroo or something. – This one happened as well. As we all know, it is called Karmic Koala
10. Thunderbird 3.0 might get released…that would be nice…taking long enough. – This one might happen soon, as we currently have the Beta 2 of Thunderbird, and mozilla don’t do many betas (ha…)

So, looks like a very successful year for me so far in predictions. More to come people…

Ok, some of you may remember I put down my 10 predictions for the coming year. Well, a few of them have come true. Lets see… 2. Apple won’t wait...

Ok, the predictions first. I predicted 2 things earlier in the year.

1. That there would be 2 HTC android-based phones released this year
2. That I would get my computer fixed.

Let me first of all say that number 2 should come true this week. I sent a letter to the company that is “fixing” my motherboard, and I recieved a phone call today saying they would refund me the money within the next 2 days. For anyone who doesn’t know, this company has had my motherboard for 2 months now, and have been saying it is being fixed everytime I email them. This is a great thing, because it finally means I can get my computer up and running soon.

Second of all, my prediction about the android-based HTC phones is going to be half true in May. In May they will release the HTC Magic. It is basically the G1 without a physical keyboard. I have not found anything else new about it. And nothing good new about it. Ach well…such is life.

Last of all…my news. I have recently come into possession of a Sega Megadrive, and when I get a few of my old games back, I will be rocking the retro. Woop! This leads me on to say that I am now going to try and build up a collection of lots of retro gaming systems (NES, atari, n64, gamecube, whatever) so if you happen to have one that you don’t use anymore…I’ll be happy to take it off your hands . Currently I only have the PS2 and the megadrive…but you have to start somewhere eh .

Now I’m off to study for my Physical and Organic Chemistry test on Friday. Yes, I was studying, I’m just having a wee break.

Ok, the predictions first. I predicted 2 things earlier in the year. That there would be 2 HTC android-based phones released this year That I would get my computer fixed....

Right, ok, so its that time of year when everyone tries to say what they think will happen with tech in the next year/few years.

Now, I don’t know why people keep doing this…because they are almost always wrong. Let me give you a few examples.

Bill Gates 1982 – “640K is more memory than anyone will ever need”
PC World in 2000 – “Within 3 years we will have PDA and phone batteries that last a year, like watch batteries.”
Alan Sugar 2005 – “Next Christmas, the ipod will be kaput”

If you want more you can go here http://listverse.com/history/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/

So…the question we all ask is…why on earth do we do it?
I have an answer…because its fun.

I am not expecting anything I say to be correct…but at this point in time this is how I feel it will go this year.

1. Microsoft will postpone their deadline for Windows 7. (Currently at 3rd quarter of this year)
2. Apple won’t wait till Christmas to release their new Iphone, which is what they said they will do.
3. 10000 people will once again say that this is the year of linux.
4. This will be the year of linux.
5. I will get my computer working again.
6. Google will release 2 more versions of their G range of phones, taking as long to release the source code as they did with the first version.
7. Canonical will make an increasingly stupid name for version 9.10 of Ubuntu. Kranky Kangaroo or something.
8. We will see the start of the silicon -> something else switchover, near the end of the year.
9. Google will release a desktop OS, because they don’t have one yet.
10. Thunderbird 3.0 might get released…that would be nice…taking long enough.
11. 3d desktops will become all the rage, and noone will believe linux users when they say we’ve had the cube for 6 years.

Ok, these are my predictions. If I think of anymore, I will put them in, but I will post one at the end of the year discussing what was right, and what was wrong.

Maybe I’ll be quoted as one of the top 30 worst predictions ever. Nah…that crown belongs to the people in the link above.

Right, ok, so its that time of year when everyone tries to say what they think will happen with tech in the next year/few years. Now, I don’t know why...