Given the dominance of Taiwanese OEMs, especially with manufacturing partners in China, CompuTex is where the world now goes to to find the hardware trends that will shape the next year.
These can be summarized pretty easily:
- Netbooks. They get the keyboard problem. Your next laptop is guaranteed to be smaller than your current one. Your shoulders will thank you.
- Touchscreens. Touch is now a mainstream interaction on every level of consumer computing. Tablet, laptop, netbook, phone. Touchscreens are everywhere.
- Stick memory. Many Taiwanese call it SSD, for solid state memory. It’s chip memory. Prices have fallen through the floor and capacity continues to grow dramatically. It can serve as a hard drive inside your machine or the equivalent of an old floppy inside it.
- Wireless. This is a WinTel show, much like Comdex was in the last decade. This year Intel focused on its work in WiMax, and if it can get international carriers to support it the Americans will follow. Think super-fast WiFi you can use while you drive.
All these trends are going to fold within one another. We are already seeing sticks sold with basic software, like security. I could easily see you putting operating systems and applications on one, so you wear your operating environment around your neck.
Consider the options that WiMax connectivity could provide to mobile phones, or how netbooks and phones are merging. Consider how wires are fast becoming obsolete. I haven’t needed one since leaving Atlanta.
Now, consider what software and services you can create with all this new stuff. Your screen can be any size, it’s all hi-def. Your bandwidth is virtually unlimited, or it seems so next to current file sizes. The user interface race is again wide open.
What starts in Taiwan will be transformed in America into what we’re using by this time next year. This will power our gadgets, dominate our Christmas shopping, become our business essentials.
The picture isn’t as clear at CompuTex as it used to be at Comdex, because the software and most of the marketing, the reasons for having it, have not yet been added.
When it is I guarantee you will want it.
