I've said a million times but hating a company and wishing ill on them is folly, particularly a company like Apple. They have driven the smartphone market to where it is today. Everyone else has been playing catch-up. All they're doing is making Google, Microsoft, and RIM (lulz) work harder to release better products. Siri is merely an extension of that continuing trend. Within a year, we'll see everyone pushing to release a competitor for it, making all smartphones just a little bit smarter and easier to use. We're just getting to the point where Google is starting to push back, forcing Apple to improve in areas of iOS that they've let stagnate for far too long.

With compression and h264 codecs, you can have have a relatively slow internet connection and still stream 720p content. Here in the US, I have a 16Mb connection (real speeds of about 2MB) and I can stream high definition content just fine... in fact, I can stream two sources of HD content simultaneously (but just barely). Most people don't care about 1080p and can't tell the difference between it and 720p (outside of animation, I often struggle to see the difference). Internet connections are good enough now where most of the public can take advantage of hosting little or no local content in favor of streaming everything from an outside source.

PS. Note the difference between Megabyte (MB) and Megabit (Mb) in connections. A Megabit is 1/8th of a Megabyte.

I buy your competition argument though. It's just sometimes hard to immediately see the advantages that come from competition.

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/10-tech-trends-to-watch-for-in-2012-1050007

1. Windows 8 revolution

This is the biggie, and not just because of Microsoft's enormous user base: Windows 8 is a dramatically different version of the world's most popular OS, with particular emphasis on tablets.

2. Really good tablets

If 2011 was when the tablet market learned to walk, 2012 is when it'll learn to run.

3. Big names in big trouble

Some of tech's biggest firms face a rocky ride in the coming year: the Financial Times reports that the EU "plans to slam Google with a 400-plus page" statement of anti-trust objections before possibly embarking on legal action, while in the US the Federal Trade Commission has ordered Facebook to behave itself or face action. The EU's sniffing around Facebook too, with German regulators being a particular thorn in the social network's side.

4. TV continues to change

The lines between TV and PC will continue to blur in 2012.

5. Voice input

We're loath to call this voice recognition, because it's bigger than that: natural language systems such as Apple's Siri are closer to virtual assistants or intelligent software agents than traditional computer voice recognition, not least because you're taking advantage of enormously powerful servers rather than the processing power of your device.

6. More and more Ultrabooks

We like ultrabooks, the super-thin and super-portable Apple-inspired notebooks from the likes of Acer, Asus and Toshiba. We're not so keen on their prices, though, so it's good to see DigiTimes predicting that prices will fall by as much as 10% in early 2012, bringing Ultrabooks into the sub-$1000 price bracket. We're expecting to see as many as fifty new Ultrabooks at January's CES extravaganza, not to mention new, slimline MacBook Pros from Apple later in the year.

7. The end of boxed software

We predicted this one last year, but Windows 8 didn't arrive as early as we'd hoped: Windows 8 brings the app store model to the majority of the world's desktops, and between it and Apple's Mac App Store (not to mention the mobile app stores on iOS, Android and on Android forks such as Amazon's Kindle Fire) we're looking at the end of shrink-wrapped software boxes.

8. Everything in the cloud

The rise of mobile devices means that we expect to get our stuff on any device, anywhere we happen to be - and more often than not, that means storing our stuff in the cloud.

9. Mobile payments

There's more to mobile payments than near field communications (NFC) chips, although that's where most of the hype is currently focused. Ebay tells us that 10% of its UK payments are now made via mobile phones, while a recent survey by KPMG found that some 24% of people worldwide are making phone-based payments. Factor in the arrival of NFC chips in mobiles and NFC readers in more high street shops and it's clear that mobile money is going to be a big deal in 2012.

10. Censorship

While ISPs won't - and can't, under EU law - be forced to monitor everybody's online activities, demands for per-site censorship will soundtrack 2012. The BPI is already asking ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, while in the US the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act could result in entire sites being blocked by ISPs, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks as a result of a few users' bad behaviour.

Such US legislation could have global effects, because most of the world's websites are registered in the US: while SOPA is opposed by the tech industry's biggest names, it's widely expected to become law in time for the New Year.

Voice input is still not good enough for the average person (people tend to find it impersonal and error prone), and expect people to continue to favour conventional systems for the next several years

Have you used Siri yet? It's a HUGE step forward. And due to its server-side nature, it's only going to get smarter over time. Being able to say "wake me up at five in the morning" and have it set an alarm immediately (no further input needed) or say "I want pizza" and have it list you a half-dozen places to call 2 seconds later or any of the other crazy shit I've seen it do is a giant leap forward for voice tech. And it just launched. Where it will be in 12 months is anyone's guess.

Apple moved the bar forward (again). It's enough to make me strongly consider going back to iPhone unless Google steps it up before my contract expires.