Happy New Year 2009

Predicting the year ahead is rather too short term for a futurologist ... but in the gadget's area I specialise in there are a few continuing trends.   Smart phones will continue to be used by more and more people for internet access and communications when out and about, as the user experience improves and eco-systems for adding new applications become more important, both distinctive features inspired by the iPhone.  As the year ends, and we finish this festive season in 12 months time, we will begin seeing more Near Field Comms functionality in the high end smart phones allowing people to use them in place of travel cards and for small payments etc.  There are also indications that the home media server may become more palatable to consumers as they realise the amount of personally valuable media that has accumulated on their various devices.  Gaming is gradually becoming more mass-market through devices like the Wii - we should see the success of this learnt from by one or more console producers.  Finally we will see yet more advances in processor development, lower power devices despite more processor cores included in one package, and more software support for exploiting multiple cores as well as for utilising graphics processors for more general number crunching.  

Happy New Year!