10 tech trends to watch for in 2012

[rocketpig]

Slimebeast said:

Interesting stuff. As an Apple hater I am sad to hear that Siri is a game-changer. Siri is some kind of voice recognition function, right? Is it more advanced than Kinect (or Microsofts vision for a nexgen Kinect)?

Now what about the bandwidth and iTV? Here in Sweden we have comparatively strong internet connections but with all the problems with my ISP (the biggest in the country) I dont think I could watch TV with good quality (10Mb, which may sound decent, but it's not a stable 10Mb and it disconnects quite often) and from what I've heard fast broadband to the masses in USA is even weaker. I don't know, maybe I'm from the stone age but it just sounds like internet-TV on a mass market basis is still a few years in the future.

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.