January 11, 2007

2007’s Top Consumer Technology Trends

By James Stout
Technology Columnist

The year 2007 will offer a wild ride from a consumer technology perspective, so tightly buckle your digital seatbelts.

Unlike past years where revolutionary products defined the technology landscape, this year will be one of evolution, refinement, and a seemingly unlimited number of choices. This doesn’t mean you should stand on the sidelines, but it does mean you have to carefully consider how you want use technology and determine your priorities before buying.

If there’s a single piece of advice I can give all consumers, it’s that the best technology for a given person is one that will work for you—not the other way around. Significant behavioral changes should not be required. So, let’s get started. We’ll start with home entertainment, move to computer related trends, and finish up with mobile phones and services.

High-definition TVs will continue to improve and drop in prices but there will be few breakthroughs in 2007
By this time next year, most TVs will cost one third less, but we won’t see those huge drops begin until next fall. The major TV technologies will continue to be plasma and LCD with a small market share going to rear projection sets known as micro-displays.

Several anticipated new technologies were sidelined because the precipitous plasma/LCD price drops made the newbie technologies prohibitively expensive by comparison. A dynamic long predicted by industry insiders is that LCD TVs will overtake plasmas and eventually push them to a 10 percent market share. Finally, there will be more TVs accepting the highest definition, 1080p, with the goal of accommodating high-definition DVDs and other high-resolution content. These sets are absolutely worth considering if they fit your budget.

Home entertainment systems will take a major step forward
There are a lot of families fed up with the movie theater experience and equipment manufacturers realize that there’s a huge market for entertainment systems to satisfy these families needs which are smaller, easier on the eye, and simpler to use. The reality is most of us enjoy a realistic movie and music experience, but we don’t have dedicated entertainment rooms. Major innovations from speaker and furniture manufacturers bode well for families wanting both form and function in their entertainment technology.

iPods will increase their domination of the portable entertainment landscape
It’s surprising in my opinion that local competitors such as SanDisk and Creative Labs can’t do a decent job of mimicking Apple. If Apple were to come out with a music subscription service, like Napster or Rhapsody, where you can rent their entire library for $15 a month, the war would be over without a shot being fired.

The biggest change this year will not be new iPod models but all the new ways an entertainment lifestyle can be created around them. There will be hundreds of portable audio systems and video players to increase the size of the iPod video’s small screen size. There is already one PC display, which has a built-in iPod dock and a toiler paper holder with an iPod dock and sound system (although the latter may be over the line for most of us!)

New PCs will radically change the way we experience the Internet and more Windows users will begin using Macs
The latest chips from Intel and AMD will accelerate our computing experience by 40-50 percent or more. Programs and Web pages will load at astonishing speeds while music and photo files will take much less time to process. This kind of immediacy will change our computing experience, and these new PC models will be surprisingly affordable. Throw in the Windows Vista operating system and you’ve got a system that will be future-proof for years. On the Mac front, you’ll see more Windows users purchasing Macs so they can have their cake and eat it too. Now that Macs use Intel’s most powerful chips and Boot Camp allows Macs to seamlessly run both the Mac and Windows operating system, it makes sense for many consumers to enjoy the best of both worlds.

This year will bring many changes beyond speed and software. It will be a year when the size of powerful desktops shrink by more than half and many desktop users will purchase their first notebook PC even if mobility isn’t an issue. Gateway and HP have both introduced 19-plus- inch notebooks as desktop replacements as they provide a clean look not available with the current desktop, monitor, and keyboard systems. Your desk will likely look much different by the end of the year.

2007 will usher in mainstream use of SmartPhones and GPS devices
The number of choices will be staggering and only a few of them may be worthy of your money. Still, there are compelling reasons for many to adopt both of these technologies. The biggest change to SmartPhones is the huge drop in prices from the previous $500-$600 to $150-$300. Having made the switch over the last 90 days at the higher price, my only regret is that I waited so long.

On-demand access to e-mail and the Web will be commonplace. The new introductions will be sleeker, more colorful, and weigh less. Mobile phone video capture capabilities will be more important than we realize. Imagine witnessing and recording a crime in progress and immediately posting it online. You’ll see this and more shortly.

GPS will similarly go through big changes as the services get smarter and the devices get easier to use. The difficult part will be deciding what type of device best suits you, i.e. a mobile phone with GPS or GPS that accommodates mobile. Handheld GPS systems will become commonplace because of their cool factor and their affordability.

Other technology changes are in store for Bay Area consumers, but these should be more than enough for most of us to accommodate. In future, articles, we’ll explore each of these trends more closely, and show you how to take advantage of them for your families and businesses.

James Stout is the owner of Bay Area Gadgets (www.bayareagadgets.com). Send him your questions at his e-mail address: james@bayareagadgetscom or call (408) 393-4779.