N. Nagaraj

The pace of change that rocks the tech world is only going to XLrate during 2009. Here are a set of nine trends that will catch on next year. Look out for them, prepare for them and latch on to ride the next wave of technology influences under every category of gadgets that rule our lives.

Small form, big performance
Netbooks, a low-cost but highly portable class of laptop/notebook computers primarily used for accessing the web and email, which are hot in the world of computers right now, will become more expensive. They will also become more capable as most of the current generation of netbooks are grossly underpowered except for the most basic productivity applications. There will then be three categories of netbooks: the cheap and low-powered netbooks, the more capable but medium-priced netbooks and the very expensive and highly capable ones. The last category already exists as the traditional ‘ultra-portables’; the buyers in the first category will be tempted to pick up offerings from the mid-range. By 2010, netbooks and laptop notebooks will be the same category.

More QWERTYs
There is likely to be a big jump in QWERTY phones from the top mobile handset marketers. All the hype and ‘wow-ness’ of touch apart, if you want good messaging capabilities, you need a good keypad. And some of the most convenient keypads around are the QWERTY type. The sometimes-cramped QWERTY from other brands will give way to a more Blackberry-esque form factor. And you will definitely see a push towards alternative QWERTY keypads like the Nokia E70’s.

As well as touch
You will see more Touch-screen mobile phones and mobile devices. I know, this sort of contradicts the earlier one, but there is space for both! The young buyer in the mobile phone market will move more and more towards touch-based models and then move to the qwerty phones as life becomes more serious. You will find more and more gadgets– mp3 players, game consoles/controllers, remote controllers, portable video players – becoming touch-based.

Multi-tasking players
2009 will not see many more standalone mp3 players. Most of the players will be media players, meaning they will be able to play music and video as well as show picture slideshows etc. You will also see fewer players with small screens; Most will have at least 2.4-inch screens. While more phones pack the ability to play all media, the portable media player will flourish because of the combination of higher storage and better connectivity. What about iPod classic, you ask? We expect that the iPod Touch will become the ‘iPod’.

Cable trouble
Messy cables will still weave around your house connecting up devices. There are too many protocols of wireless that different devices use. For some combination or the other, you’d need the cables and you might as well have cables all around rather than trying to figure out which combinations work and which don’t. Anyway, you need banks of power strips just for the power connections. The most you can do is to hide the cables, but that would also typically mean that you wouldn’t have too much flexibility in moving things around the house.

Gain-drain
In 2009, you will still not be able to get enough battery life for a given device for a given purpose. All improvements in battery life will be neutered by increasing power consumption by devices. And if, by chance, there is a significant improvement in the battery life for a device, you will start using it so much more that you will still find yourself falling short by just a little. Yes, if that concept of wireless power ever comes through, you will enjoy it, but I don’t think that’s going to happen in 2009.

Or-kaput
The social networking space will lose its coolness. It will become ordinary, like having an email address, or lately, like having a blog. You will see fewer updates by most people on their social sites. You will find a new kind of snob – the one without a social network identity. Oh, I don’t mean the people who genuinely don’t care for social networking; I mean the ones who’d like to but who deliberately don’t. Blogs will slow down as well. Many personal blogs will have fewer posts than usual as more and more people figure out that it is difficult to post meaningful stuff to generate a genuine conversation.

Safer surfing
You will see better awareness about privacy and security on the internet, as well as on personal devices. More people will have mobile anti-virus and password protection and remote-access enabled on their phones.
More people will start taking a serious look into the information that they put out in public spaces (like their social network pages). You will also see less ‘public’ media sharing; fewer people will post photos and videos in free- access -to-all pages. You will see more people using the ‘incognito’ – like feature in Google Chrome in the forthcoming versions of other browsers. You will also start seeing more people using encryption in their desktops and notebooks.

Convergence yes, but…
What will happen to converged devices? We’ve been asking this question since the beginning of this century and the answers have been varying.
But I think this is what will happen this year: each of the things that we’ve been talking about is getting to be more and more visible in mobile phones – camera, media player, email and web, remote-access etc. – but I still believe that some of the best devices in each category would continue to be a winner.
There is a huge difference in the how and what of the images captured in a cell phone with an 8 MP camera and an 8 MP digital camera.
Overall, there is one source you can depend on – Smartbuy. We will continue to provide dazzling insight into the technologies and gadgets of tomorrow. With detailed and balanced user reviews and cutting-through jargon essays about new tech, you get your weekly dose of tech in these columns through the year ahead.