10 Types Of People

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 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 ...

I’ve been thinking a lot about tablets recently. My dad got an iPad recently and seems to absolutely love it. You can read about his thoughts on it on http://gordonsramblings.blogspot.com/. Now, he recently took it to a camp we were involved in, and used it for notes, timetables, etc and it got me thinking. In a paperless world, do we need tablets?

I love the idea of a paperless world. Anyone who knows me will recognise this. I hate paper so much. I look over at the other side of this room, and there is so much wasted space with loads of paper. But, do current computers really cut it? I don’t think so. I think, in a world with no papers, we need tablets/e-reader type devices. I’ve not totally decided what a device to completely get rid of paper would be, but it certanarily wouldn’t be an e-reader, an ipad or many other of the tablets that exist at this moment in time. It would have to have either a screen that is very very low powered, can be seen in bright sunlight, be nice on the eyes, and still be able to view videos and other colour, and fast-refreshing items (possibly like a colour e-ink screen that has a fast refresh rate), or a screen like a pixel qi screen. I have talked before about pixel qi screens which are used in devices such as the olpc XO laptop, and the Notion ink adam. But, as I said, I’m still not sure which would be best.

Then, of course, we come to the question of input devices, and whether typing on a virtual (or physical) keyboard, or using handwriting recognition, or just allowing freeform writing (so that its like paper) would be best. For the 2nd, we would need better algorithms and for the 3rd we would need nicer screens that would allow pressure sensitivity etc, but I don’t think these are that far off.

Obviously, there are many, many questions that there are during thinking about tablets etc, but the point of this article is to say that I think that we need tablet/e-reader/ipad-like devices to enter the paperless world (and also a change of attitude from some people…but that is a different story).

I've been thinking a lot about tablets recently. My dad got an iPad recently and seems to absolutely love it. You can read about his thoughts on it on http://gordonsramblings.blogspot.com/. Now, he recently took it to a camp we were involved in, and used it for notes, timetables, etc and it got me thinking. ...