Tech 2005: What's New and What's Next
The products you use are about to get smarter, faster, smaller, cheaper, and more colorful. Here's your guide to what's ahead in PCs, software, mobile gadgets, home electronics, and more.Michael Desmond is a freelance writer living in Burlington, Vermont. He looks forward to the day when he can have all his gadgets installed subcutaneously in his index finger.
Michael Desmond
Upgrading your future PC could become child's play. You'll plug in building-block-like modules that pack anything from twin 64-bit processors to dual graphics boards. You'll gaze at stunning flat-panel monitors that display a wider range of colors than today's best LCDs, and you'll carry cell phones with 10GB hard drives.
Eventually, smarter technologies will turn most every car, wall, and appliance into an intelligent resource. The foundations for a truly connected future are being laid right now. Take a look in the following pages to see what the next two years will bring us.
The Next PC
Photograph by Courtesy of AMD.
Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for industry research firm Insight 64, says dual-core CPUs will offer impressive performance gains under multiprocessor-aware operating systems such as Windows XP. The upside looks best for games, photo and video editing, and other processor-intensive tasks.
Just don't be too disappointed when the first dual-core processors show up with clock rates as much as one-third lower than those of their single-core siblings, says Brookwood. The lower clock rates will reduce heat, cost, and stress on the chips.
On the 64-bit front, Brookwood expects that two-thirds of all PCs in 2006 will feature 64-bit processors--though only 10 to 15 percent of those will ship with 64-bit applications. But with memory capacities on high-end PCs likely to reach 4GB or more in 2006, expect memory-hungry, hyperrealistic games and advanced photo and video editing to take full advantage of the 64-bit systems.
Lego-Like PC?
For a glimpse at the future of graphics, you need look no further than PCI Express (PCIe). It's the graphics interface that will replace PCI and AGP, and it promises nearly twice the performance of AGP. PCIe boards based on the NVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra and ATI Radeon X80 chips have raised the bar for 3D graphics realism. Amping up graphics even more are boards using Scalable Link Interface technology, to let two boards work together--faster.
Guiding this development is an ambitious road map for PCIe. The so-called Gen 2 version of the spec is already on the drawing board and should double per-channel performance to 500 megabytes per second, and Brookwood expects a 1-gigabyte-per-second version down the road. That's serious speed.
PCIe could ultimately transform the shape of future PCs. An upcoming flavor of PCIe is being designed that will let fast peripherals connect to a PC over a cable (7 meters or more), rather than plugging into the motherboard. Imagine a PC consisting of pluggable modules--for example, a small box for the graphics card, another box for the hard drive, and a third box for the wireless network card. Rather than opening the case to add devices, you just slide a PCIe module into a bay. By the end of 2006, who knows? You could be upgrading your next PC with Lego-like blocks--the ultimate no-hassle upgrade.
Splash of Color
Toshiba's prototype blends the best of CRT and LCD displays in a svelte flat panel.
We've been tempted with visions of bendable displays for years. Alas, the promise of big and flexible organic light-emitting-diode and other foldable displays remains the stuff of lab demonstrations--not quite science fiction, but not quite technological reality, either. So companies, including Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and a few startups, are instead ramping up the quality of tomorrow's flat screens.
Toshiba and Canon, for example, are cooking up thinner, lighter, and better flat panels, based on a technology called Surface Conduction Electron-Emitter Display, or SED. It shoots electrons through thousands of nanometers-wide slits onto a phosphor-coated screen, blending the best of traditional CRTs and LCDs. The Toshiba-Canon joint venture, SED Incorporated, will manufacture initial products by 2005, with volume production expected in 2007.
In Living Color
Genoa Color takes a different approach in displaying colors on screen. Its Multi-Primary Color (MPC) technology provides additional colors (such as yellow and cyan) that TVs can mix to display an expanded range of colors, including brighter versions of colors that RGB (red-green-blue) screens produce poorly. Using the MPC chip and up to three additional primary colors, TVs and monitors can deliver more-realistic color--particularly the flesh tones and yellows where the RGB method is weakest. MPC should be appear in high-end rear-projection televisions in the second quarter of 2005.
Sony is taking another tack to meet a similar challenge, introducing in Japan the Qualia 005 line of 40- and 46-inch LCD TVs, which use white light-emitting diodes to backlight the screen. Called Triluminos, these LEDs let displays produce more colors than the cold cathode-based fluorescent lamps used in most LCD TVs. Jon Peddie, principal analyst for Jon Peddie Research, a leading graphics research firm, says the effect "is amazing and [provides] photographic color gamma." In short, colors on screen look true to life.
Photo Epiphany
The popularity of digital photography is leading to a revolution in imaging software. Today, cameras can tag images with useful metadata (data about the image) such as the date and time a shot was taken, the camera model, and other details. Future cameras, equipped with GPS chips, will go further. "I could see a cell phone's camera putting in the GPS coordinates of an image, and software that automatically recognizes that the shot is in Paris," says Tapan Bhat, director of product management for Adobe's Consumer Digital Imaging and Digital Video Products division. He predicts such technology could surface in 2007.
Desktop software will be smarter, too, able to analyze photos to recognize elements such as mountains, dogs, or swimming pools and then apply metatag information to aid organization.
Also likely by 2006 are software advancements that will automate routine tasks such as removing red-eye and fixing minor flaws, helping users get better results in less time. Further out, software could provide features like "lazy snapping," a technology Microsoft Research recently demonstrated in China. With a few vague mouse strokes, users can, for example, identify an object they want to crop, and the lazy-snapping algorithms will automatically detect and mark the borders. The feature analyzes the image's contrast and colors to detect object edges with much greater precision than is possible with current magic-wand controls.
Microsoft Research also showed technology that can transform a 2D photo of a face into a 3D model. The tool could allow you to import a realistic-looking model of yourself into a game.
Adobe's Bhat emphasizes that smart software will ultimately revolutionize the way we work with and even think of photos. But the payoffs remain years away. "The first [such features] will start hitting in 2006, but it may be fairly rudimentary. It's going to be a while before the technology is good enough to happen by default."
The Hold Everything Discs
Panasonic's DMR-E700BD Blu-ray recorder is currently available only in Japan.
In this age of HDTV and 300GB hard disks, the 4.7GB DVD disc just isn't getting the job done. The good news: Three groups are touting optical disc formats that offer four or five times the capacity of today's DVDs. But a format war is afoot, and no one knows how it will shake out.
The High Definition-DVD group, led by NEC and Toshiba, has created a 15GB format some analysts say will offer lower disc prices. NEC, Sanyo, and Toshiba plan to ship HD-DVD players in 2005, and recorders possibly in 2005 or 2006. NEC plans to ship an HD-DVD drive for PCs as well.
Blu-Ray Offerings
Sony's BDZ-S77 Recorder (which sells in Japan) plays and records Blu-ray discs.
The competing Blu-ray standard--headed up by Matsushita, Sony, and other PC and consumer electronics giants--stores 50GB on a disc. Blu-ray recorders (including the LG Electronics LG-XBG420, Panasonic DMR-E700BD, and Sony BDZ-S77) are now available in Japan--albeit at prices above $1000. Sony expects Blu-ray products to be available in the United States in late 2005 or early 2006. Nonrecording players--which could play any type of content stored on a Blu-ray disc--are expected by the end of 2005. Sony says its upcoming PlayStation 3 will come with a Blu-ray player.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray employ blue-laser optics, which use a much shorter wavelength to tightly pack bits of data on the disc surface. The problem is, blue-laser optics are expensive. So a third technology, called Digital Multilayer Disc (DMD), from D Data, has emerged. It uses low-cost red lasers and a transparent, fluorescing medium to store up to six layers of data within a disc. Instead of pointing a laser at a reflective surface layer, DMD interacts with fluorescing materials embedded in multiple layers to achieve initial capacities of 15GB. DMD promises lower-cost hardware and media than blue-laser-based formats. D Data plans on disc capacities doubling to 30GB in 2005 and doubling again to 60GB by 2007. However, DMD lacks the kind of industry support that's lined up behind Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
Don't expect quick victories in this format fight. By mid-2005, major Hollywood studios will likely take sides and force the issue. Blu-ray could hold an edge with Sony's large film libraries. HD-DVD has the imprimatur of the DVD Forum, the group that controls the spec for DVD.
In 2007, Sony expects to ship a four-layer Blu-ray disc that will hold 100GB of data, and has developed prototypes of an eight-layer, 200GB disc. Ultimately, recorders and drives that support both HD-DVD and Blu-ray may emerge.
Peskier Worms
It's a dangerous world, and it's only getting worse. By 2006, you can expect security threats to shift and grow. Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for the Internet Storm Center at the SANS Institute, expects the cat-and-mouse game between attackers and PC owners to continue, with next-generation hacks becoming more persistent and pernicious. Spyware, for example, will seed itself all over a victim's Windows Registry and hard disk, making it difficult for automated tools to pull out all the weeds. Ullrich also expects attacks to become more fault-tolerant. An attack could employ two or more programs that monitor each other to ensure that the infection is not rooted out of the system by antivirus software.
Spreading to Handhelds
This past summer, the first virus infecting Pocket PCs and cell phones emerged, including a variation that uses Bluetooth connections to jump among handsets. It is only the first salvo, says Ullrich, in a barrage that will target devices of all stripes. "Everything that uses an IP address will be a target," he warns.
Chip makers and OS writers are fighting back, trying to close one of the most exploited holes: the buffer overrun. Viruses often create overruns by flooding a PC with more code or data than expected, leaving the excess code in an unprotected space on that system where it can execute. So AMD's Athlon 64 processor includes an NX bit, which flags code for execution. Combined with an NX bit-aware OS--such as Windows XP with SP2--this feature sterilizes miscreant code that overflows programming boundaries by leaving it untagged. Desktops with this CPU enjoy the functionality today. But Ullrich worries that network routers and mobile devices will not provide buffer overrun protection for some time.
Super Cell Phones
Has any product evolved as quickly as the cell phone? Three years ago, flip phones were cool. Today, a flip phone is also a digital camera, an e-mail device, and a PDA. With major service providers, including AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless, finally rolling out 3G service, cell phones are poised to become the ultimate do-it-all devices.
Samsung's SPH-S2300 cell phone sports a 3.2-megapixel camera.
"[Mobile phones] will be more powerful, have better screens, provide longer battery life, and push more features," says Andy Abramson, an industry watcher who publishes a popular blog on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony. Expect to see phones that capture multimegapixel photos (such as Samsung's SPH-S2300
Samsung's SPH-S2300 cell phone sports a 3.2-megapixel camera.
); stream TV and feature-length videos (at smoother frame rates than what's available today); and play realistic 3D games, thanks to graphics chips like the NVidia GeForce 3D 4500 that have introduced 3D acceleration and texture mapping to mobile handsets.
Bigger Storage
The Samsung SPH-V5400 has a 1.5GB hard drive.
Cell phones equipped with tiny, 1-inch drives aren't far off, either. The first such phone, Samsung's SPH-V5400 with a 1.5GB drive, will be available in Korea soon, and analyst Jon Peddie expects that cell phones packing hard drives will appear in the United States in 2005. Drive capacities could go as high as 10GB, allowing users to store lots of MP3s, high-resolution images, and movies.
Shrinking chip sizes and costs will enable multiprotocol cell phones that can switch between digital cellular networks and local area Wi-Fi--and, later, wide area 802.16e WiMax and perhaps 802.20 networks. These new types of networks are designed to provide data rates of up to 1 mbps at ranges of 8 miles or more. Hybrid cellular/VoIP handsets, such as the Motorola CN620 Wi-Fi phone, will know what network is available, and will make the best choice to place the call at the lowest price, Abramson says. The bottleneck now: Carriers must work through complicated billing and network transfer issues for these agile devices.
Your cell phone will even take to the skies. Airbus recently completed tests of an onboard base station, called a picocell, that will enable cell phone users to make reliable in-flight connections with base stations that are located on the ground.
Of course, none of this will work without service providers getting a chance to charge for their piece of the action. Multiplayer online gaming will have users battling head-to-head over fast networks. In 2005, cell phones will become the largest user of GPS chips of any device. Integrated GPS chips already let some mobile phone users check their handset for directions, but users can expect more location-based services--and, alas, advertising.
Smarter Appliance
Smarthome's equipment allows you to control your house.
Every year, home automation seems poised to take off. And every year, tech-savvy home owners are unimpressed by the poor performance and reliability of products based on the aging X10 standard (which was developed by X10 USA, the company responsible for making those tiny surveillance cameras, and for delivering a host of annoying pop-up ads to promote them). X10 devices send signals to each other over a power line, but users complain that some devices don't function well together and that simple things like flipping a light switch can produce sluggish or inconsistent results.
In 2005, a protocol called Insteon should help change that. Insteon supports both wireless RF (radio frequency) and power-line operation, and promises to be more reliable than existing options. Backward compatible with X10 gear, Insteon could help renew enthusiasm for home automation.
Ken Fairbanks, director of sales for Smarthome, a company that develops Insteon-based products (such as transceivers and touchscreens), envisions a growing market for Insteon. Smarthome's products will tell, for example, if a bathroom light switch in an elderly parent's home hasn't turned on by 10 a.m., perhaps indicating he or she is ill. It can then alert family members.
Insteon's competitors include Zensys's Z-Wave and the ZigBee Alliance, both of which offer wireless automation. The ZigBee group, made up of nearly 100 companies--including Mitsubishi, Motorola, Philips, and Samsung--could deliver home-automation kits using the standard in 2006.
Kitchen tools are getting smarter, too. Ted Selker, director of the Context Aware Computing Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is working on a spoon that measures and reports the thickness and makeup of a mixture to help guide you through a recipe. Another project: a plastic food container that keeps track of how many days the contents have been in the fridge.
Selker also envisions homes in which kitchen tables, family-room walls, and other surfaces become virtual workspaces. The kids' homework and parents' bills will be called up on these surfaces.
High-Concept Cars
BMW's 5 Series sedans sport its IDrive technology, featuring a joystick-style knob and a menu button (above) that initiates a screen on the dashboard (left).
We've been dreaming about high-tech cars since the Eisenhower administration. Although flying cars aren't here yet, what we can expect over the next two years are vehicles with smarter interior features and embedded hard drives that store maps, phone directories, and digital audio. Thanks to the widespread use of digital audio players, car manufacturers may finally provide line-in jacks in car radios.
Automakers are poised to take another run at heads-up displays, using technology similar to that used in fighter jets to place information in the driver's line of sight. In fact, BMW offers this capability as an option in some of its 5 Series sedans. BMW and Ford are independently working on adaptive cruise control systems that would marry radar sensors with intelligent controls so cars could automatically respond to other drivers on the road by maintaining a safe distance.
Wi-Fi Car
New uses for current, off-the-shelf technologies are being considered for in-car implementations--for example, using LCD monitors for a customizable dashboard interface, or turning vehicles into Wi-Fi access points. "There's a lot of talk about the Wi-Fi car," says Thomas Hallauer, editor of TelematicsUpdate.com. Wi-Fi-capable cars could let you download MP3s or navigation maps to on-board systems. But such capabilities will take a couple of years to arrive, he says.
Looking further ahead are the folks at the MIT Media Lab. One of its projects is the "soft car" concept, which envisions a chassis with an airbag-like exterior. Or hubless wheels that place motors and suspension in each wheel so that cars no longer need to be built around rigid drive trains and suspensions. A more likely advancement is the use of electronic ink--a material that can change the appearance of a surface--so cars could change color, making them more visible at night. Ryan Chin, studio manager for the project at MIT, says the technology could even display messages or advertising. What will they think of next?
Tech Visionary: When Everything Computes
Photograph by Jason Grow
Imagine a video wall installed in your family room that can act as a large television one instant, a videophone the next, and a Web browser after that. To make this kind of always-on, always-convenient future work, each object needs to be able to perform almost any computing task. The project's Raw Architecture Workstation (RAW) chip attempts to make such a capability a reality.
How soon will we be talking to walls, taking phone calls from refrigerators, and getting foreign-language translations from desk phones? Not yet, says Agarwal. Voice-operated kiosks with richer interfaces that go beyond today's machines "could be deployed in the next year or two. The longer-term ideas will take five to ten years," he says.
Tech Visionary: The Nearly Invisible Battery
Photograph by Robert Holmgren
"You make miles of fiber [battery material], and when you mold the case [of your device], you embed that in the molding," Dubois explains. "You can make your device smaller or lighter, because you don't have to carry around the weight of the [battery casing]." There are also paper-thin, printable batteries that are being used for everything from Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transmitters (which use tiny chips to track items at a distance) to greeting cards.
Another promising technology is a fast-charging battery that can go from zero to fully charged in less than 10 minutes. "It's a question now of moving the technology out of the lab to the manufacturing arena," Dubois says. "It's probably a couple of years out."
What about the fuel cells that we've been hearing about for gadgets? "[They're] real. People use them. The question is, when does it get into consumers' hands? Until you can buy methanol cartridges all over the country and all over the world, people are going to be hard-pressed to put fuel cells in their systems."