Game-Changing PCs of Tomorrow: Today!

Time to trade in your Gateway 2000 for one of these machines that could change the way we make our compu-time.

Google Chrome OS Laptop

This summer, we should be getting our hands on retail versions of the first computers to run on Google’s Chrome operating system. The first batch will be made by Acer and Samsung and feature 12.1 inch display screens, standard full-sized keyboards, and—wait—no hard drive. Could this machine totally change the way we compute? Maybe not, but weirder things have happened. Look, millions of people bought those fruit-flavored iMacs.

Razer Switchblade

The Razer Switchblade could be the hardware to reach the unicorn: portable World of Warcraft. Besides boasting the toughest PC name ever, the Razer Switchblade is a portable gaming device with a dynamic tactile keyboard whose keys change based on different game control schemes. You don’t have to do any fanciful programming, either: it automatically recognizes the specific game’s icons and control schemes and transfers their visuals directly to the keys.

Clover Systems Sunbook, $795

There are situations, granted very few of them, when I get to computing outside without an accessible parasol. Clover Systems’ Sunbook could rectify this with a quickness. Its specs are nothing to write home about, but if you’re not sun-averse, you can use it outside without the damn glare getting in your business. I can see this being incredibly useful in outdoor situations you are forced into but don’t want to participate in, such as mediocre high school football games, you can just dial up some Netflix and get lost in Nicolas Cage’s eyes.

Dreamplug PC, $150

The inventor of the Dreamplug PC had a dream. A dream that one day the PC and the electrical plug would be fully integrated. For no apparent reason, the Dreamplug is a four-inch PC shoved inside of an electric plug without a GPU. It’s only $150 (as it should be, with its skimpy specs), but what I am excited about is that it supposedly reduces electrical costs by up to 96%.

Toshiba Dynobook Color-Changing Qosmio T750

The only thing unique about this PC is the cover, which changes colors with a shimmer effect. Yes, this is a game-changer. Anything that moves this industry in an aesthetic direction that matches John Travolta’s TVR Tuscan in Swordfish is a revelation. Although you should’ve been sold at “Swordfish”, specs include an LED backlit display, 2.66 GHz Intel Core i5 processor, and four gigs of memory.

MSI Butterfly

With days spent primarily gaming and typing, I have developed the snarling, wizened hands of a 90 year-old finger puppeteer. My carpal tunnel stings practically every time I use a touchscreen, so I’m grateful to see MSI’s Butterfly PC. The Butterfly all-in-one PC has a repositionable display that slides up and down like an architect’s desk, reducing touchscreen fatigue.

PlayStation Tablet

Word on the street (well, Engadget) is that Sony will be releasing a PlayStation Tablet in September. I don’t know if the already-crowded tablet market can accommodate another one, or if Sony will just have a PSPGo-style hardware burnout. I am curious about this curvy prototype design, though, as well as playing classic PS1 games on a tablet. I am more optimistic about the former.

Fujitsu Esprimo FH99/CM

The Fujitsu Esprimo is being touted as the world’s first glasses-free 3D computer. It’ll launch at a staggering $3100, which, when you think about it, is a small price to pay for not having to don shutter shades alone.  Besides the 23-inch full HD 3D display, the PC boasts a 2Ghz Core i7 processor, four gigs of memory, and a 2TB hard drive.

CompuLab Trim-Slice

Israel’s CompuLab has a tiny new PC that it claims can give you the full-size PC experience with at least eighty times the adorability. It’s extremely energy efficient and runs on NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 processor. It also boasts HDMI and 5.1 digital audio outputs, meaning it could be quite lovely as an alternative multimedia device. I look forward to checking it out when it hits retail in April.

Motorola Xoom

It’s got more features than the iPad and will run on the newest Android OS.  Word though is that it’s going to cost about $800. It sounds like a lot, but the comparable iPad is fewer than a hundred bucks cheaper.  It’s got a bigger screen and better resolution, too, along with stereo speakers and a front and back camera (all of which the iPad lacks). Whether or not the iPad 2 comes out of the gate looking so sexy will ultimately determine the unpronounceable Xoom’s success.

Eurocom Racer

The Eurocom Racer is being touted as the world’s most powerful 15” notebook. I can neither confirm nor deny, but I can tell you that it is a beast. It can support Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors, up to the Intel Core i7 2920XM Extreme Edition with 8 GB of L3 cache. It’s only a matter of time before the line between desktops and laptops is erased completely.

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12 Unique and Creative Bicycles

12 Unique and Creative Bicycles

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Future Tech That Will Rule Us All

Progress marches on, with new technologies blasting out of the gun of science on a daily basis. These 11 inventions and concepts are going to be the rulers of 2011.

Mobile Video

This is one that is already starting to make some inroads, but look for it to be a major selling point in 2011 for all kinds of mobile devices. As more and more video serving sites move away from Flash towards H.264, more phones and mobile devices will be able to stream content faster and more reliably. We've already removed the television watching experience from the TV - now it's going to be wherever we can get a decent number of bars on our phone. Look for the major providers - Hulu, Netflix, etc - to hop this bandwagon this year.

HTML5

After quite a long period of wheel-spinning, we're actually starting to see some movement in the development of HTML as a markup language. Where previously interactive and multimedia elements needed to be handled by plugins, which proliferated like crazy and caused tons of cross-browser problems, now things like real-time drawing and video can be handled by just one language. The platform isn't stable quite yet, but most experts predict 2011 is the year in which people will really start running with the ball.

Electric Cars

Yes, we know the Prius has been dominating the eco-conscious circuit for nearly a decade now, but we're about ready to make the transition to the next level of transportation: fully electric cars. 2011 sees the Nissan Leaf hit the roads, the first fully-electric car from a major manufacturer. Sure, it may have a pretty limited range, but this is just the beginning - expect to see lots more vehicles, both full electrics and hybrids, push the envelope further towards battery power this year.

Voice Recognition

Voice recognition has been the holy grail for computer interface designers for decades - imagine not having to use your damn hands at all to, say, leave a comment on this article? It would be great! The technology is getting better and better, especially in mobile devices, but there's still some distance to go. Google is investing heavily in this space, acquiring Phonetic Arts, a British company that specializes in natural-sounding computerized speech.

HIV Vaccine

We saw some astounding leaps in the treatment of HIV and AIDS in 2010, with a patient in Berlin having all traces of the virus removed from his system after a stem cell transplant. The procedure that he underwent was expensive and painful, but it's opened the door to a new world of potential treatments for one of the most brutal pandemics of the last 100 years. Many scientists predict that 2011 will see the first steps towards a truly workable HIV vaccine, based on tests in Thailand that show a 30% reduction in transmissal rates.

3D TV

Many networks experimented with 3D TV in 2010, but nobody was really successful with it - the active shutter glasses required to get real third-dimension viewing were expensive and cumbersome, and the install base was just too low. Avatar proved that modern 3D is more than just a fad, so look for 2011 to be the year that the technology comes home in a big way. LG is releasing passive-glasses models this year, and other companies are expected to follow suit. All home 3D really needs is a killer app to sell it the way James Cameron's blue-people epic did.

Touchscreens

This is kind of a no-brainer - the days of the keyboard and mouse are numbered. It's quite frankly ridiculous that we're tethered to an input device that has been fundamentally unchanged for over 100 years, but the QWERTY keyboard is rapidly ending its usefulness. Touchscreens have become a default input device on any number of platforms, and with handwriting recognition and voice parsing improving every minute, it won't be long before all those touch-typing lessons become so much wasted time.

Clouds

The days of keeping all of your data in one place have been over for a while - the innate fragility of hard drives has created a culture of infinite backups, with wise computer owners duplicating their data on all sorts of media. The natural outgrowth of this is to dispense with your hard drive entirely, and as a result "cloud computing" was born. Remote servers provide data, applications and more to networked computers, with the burden being placed on the telecommunications network instead of the hard drive. Expect this to become even more commonplace in 2011, with more services adopting the model.

Chrome OS

Google can be accused of a lot of things, but not trying hard enough ain't one of them. Sure, they have a fair number of misfires (Google Wave, anyone?), but they also have a lot of successes. They've proven that Android can be a success on the mobile market, and now they're stepping into the world of full-scale operating systems with Chrome OS. Designed to work intuitively with web-based applications, Google is testing it with a limited number of test notebooks out in the wild. Expect to see the first dedicated Chrome OS products this year.

Femtocells

As our wireless devices become more and more important elements of our work and social life, the importance of having maximum bars can't be overstated. Walking around looking for service is a major pain in the ass. One possible solution is the increased emphasis on femtocells - small portable base stations that connect to your network through a broadband pipe and communicate with your smartphones and tablets wirelessly. Many pundits are predicting that this data transmission model is going to be the next big thing.

Privacy

This isn't a "technology" per se, but look for the debate about privacy and security to be one of the major movers in the technoogy world this year. After multiple major sites - most notably the Gawker group - have seen their password databases compromised, the traditional methods of authentication are seeming pretty fragile. Look for more sites to use different ways of evaluating your identity - we're already seeing a shift towards using Facebook for these purposes. Now it's only a matter of time before inventive black hats find ways to make that unsafe.

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