Hard Case: 7 Products and Trends to Look Forward to in 2010

These are not predictions.

Every year, tech pundits take stabs at predicting what hot new trends or gear will consume our interest in the coming year. I want to take a somewhat different tack, and talk about what I’m genuinely looking forward to checking out. Some of what follows is trends and industry happenings; I love this stuff, after all. Some of this represents tech that I’m really curious to personally check out. So without any more fanfare, here’s what I’m looking forward to in 2010, in no particular order.

The Ebook Reader Circular Firing Squad

I have to confess to being a Kindle 2 owner. I liked having a dozen books in my backpack while touring Europe this past summer, without the actual weight of a dozen books. So I’m one of those relatively early adopters who think this whole ebook thing is the cat’s pajamas.

Ebook readers are a hot topic. Whether or not ebook readers will be a true mass market item in the long run is less certain.
Amazon.com tried to jump start the business with the original Kindle, trying to make the Kindle be the iPod of ebook readers. But when Apple launched the iPod, no one believed that tightly integrating a piece of hardware to internet-connected software was a viable business model. Today, that model is all the rage. So only a couple of years after the Kindle launch, Amazon has serious competition from Barnes and Noble, Google and others.

Each company has a different stance on content protection, and differs on format implementations. So what looked to be a promising and convenient technology is rapidly becoming mired in walled gardens of content. We’ll likely see exclusives on different readers, just as we see exclusives on game consoles. On top of that, a few publishers recently announced they’ll be instigating time delays between hard copy publication dates and releases of said books in ebook format.

What will happen to ebooks? Who knows? But it will be fun watching the sniping and maneuvering, as the different companies jockey for competitive position. Curiously, I think Rupert Murdoch has one thing right: magazines and newspapers, pushed regularly to ebook readers, may be the winning formula in the long run. Too bad Murdoch also believes in walling off all his content from those pesky search engines.

Gulftown

Okay, so Intel is prepping a six core, 32nm successor to their LGA 1366 CPU line. I think only Gordon Mah Ung, Will Smith, about three other guys on the Internet and me are really looking forward to this.

I’ve been running a 3.3GHz Core i7 with 12GB of RAM for the past six months. In reality, I rarely stress the system. Games certainly don’t push it too hard, especially after dropping in a Radeon HD 5870 into the system. About the only time I wish for a faster system is when I batch up RAW file conversions in Photoshop and when I’m rendering DVD or high def content in Premiere Pro. Of the two applications, I don’t really wait that long for Photoshop, and I only generate video content in Premiere Pro three or four times a year.

Still, the thought of having six cores and lots of cache in one socket makes my mouth water. And when cheap 4GB DDR3 modules ship, I can have 24GB in my system. Whee!

Don’t ask me why I need six cores and 24GB. To paraphrase a Zen master, if you have to ask, you do not know.

Intel Arrandale

At the other end of the spectrum, I’m also looking forward to Arandale, Intel’s next generation laptop CPU. I’m uninterested Clarkfield (who really wants a 1.6GHz quad core CPU in a laptop, anyway?) My current laptop, with its Core 2 Duo T9600, is perfectly adequate for my current needs.

Actually, I’m not looking forward to Arrandale, the CPU, as much as what it will enable with laptops.  What I want out of Arandale is long battery life without the performance sacrifices you get in current Intel Core 2 low voltage parts. I’m not, however, particularly excited about what I’ve seen and heard about the next generation Intel integrated graphics.

Ideally, what I want is a thin and light system with a 14-15 inch screen and a halfway decent discrete GPU that weighs less than five pounds and gives my 6-8 hours of battery life. Hey, everyone’s gotta have a dream.