It's not often that one gets to witness a war between two popular technologies. You do get those one-off crossfire's between products but what we have here is a fight for survival between two portable technologies in which, at present, one seems to have an upper hand. About three years back in 2007, the concept of Netbooks was unleashed on the masses and we had loads of companies whipping up nifty devices which fought with each other for supremacy. But unfortunately when they were supposed to compete on the basis of performance and functionality they chose looks and weight issues as the benchmark. So today we surely have extremely good looking and lightweight Netbooks, but nothing which can really claim to have achieved what a user wants.
On the other hand, this year, a company from Cupertino came up with a sleek tablet known as the, if you haven't guessed, iPad, which has simply gone ahead and revolutionized the game of portability. In less than a year we have had the big brands and even the unknown ones launching their own versions of the Tablet with operating systems ranging from Android to Windows 7. And what has happened to the Netbook? It's still there, somewhere on the fringes of extinction trying to make a last ditch effort to survive.
In 2011, the Netbook has two options. Either whimper away to a silent death or fight it out with innovative features. As far as the tablet goes, right now the world is so crazy about this device that it'll surely be hard for the Netbook to annihilate its market.
In fact one of the major factors which will lead to the success or failure of portable devices is connectivity. And with cloud computing starting to catch up it will surely make life easy for both the Netbook and the Tablet. In case you are still living under a rock we'll tell you what cloud computing is. In simple terms your devices will start shrinking in storage space and through the internet you'll be able to access all your files like documents, music movies etc from anywhere. And yeah, for it to be successful we need to have high speed internet
connections. And yeah... keep on reading we'll come to that too.
Talking about other major technologies that could play big in 2011 we have high hopes form the world of 3D. We understand that every major company has come out with one or the other product which has the three dimensional feature. But what we fail to understand is why does technology ask us to still wear those clunky glasses! For those who share similar concerns we would like to tell you about the next gen Nintendo DS 3D, a portable gaming device which lets you play games in 3D without those horrible glasses. But what we want is much more. We want to walk into our movie halls and watch the celebs perform for us in 3D, and yeah without the glass barrier!
Now that we're talking about technology, we feel this is the right platform to voice some of our needs. With 3G getting rolled out it's only fair to imagine that we'll get internet access channels that don't work at snail's pace. With most of the countries taking on to the virtual world at supersonic speeds we've, to date, been denied of a decent internet experience. It's more like: Be happy with what you've got.
But friends, times are set to change. With 3G rollout we'll see a major shift in the usage of electronic devices and that's where our portable friends like the Netbooks and Tablets will gain. All that we hope is we don't stop here. Unlike our roads which are still holding on tightly to the 50kph speed limit at least the virtual world should be given the option of breaking free and experiencing the supersonic. Tata started the speed revolution with the Photon but who will take it further? Let's wait and watch.
What we can expect in 2011
Game on
Gaming technology grew by leaps and bounds this year. Even simple mobile handsets started providing great motion-controlled games. The year-end saw the amazing Kinect from Microsoft. Going by the pace of their growth we can surely hope to feel the pain of a bullet wound by 2011.
Tech Wonders
It's time for the technology biggies to concentrate on gadgets, which would simply do what we want and not wait for a command! So do we have a Google or Apple geek working towards it?
Netting it
High speed Internet access is our 2011 must have. Before you start about broadband let's make it simpler: We want to download a 1 GB file in one hour. Pay a nominal fee and shorten the time to say 15 minutes! And considering that this is possible in five minutes in certain countries, it shouldn't be a great deal to achieve in India
