Flexible Displays
First up are Flexible Displays. These are pretty cool. They’re basically an LCD display (HDTVs, Computers, Cell Phones) that can be rolled up, or folded. This will allow for much bigger screens that can fit in your pocket. This also means that one day you might be able to buy a newspaper…once. Then the news will be electronically distributed to your newspaper/screen. Talk about saving trees. Don’t get too excited just yet since these most likely won’t be available to the public for another few years.
First up are Flexible Displays. These are pretty cool. They’re basically an LCD display (HDTVs, Computers, Cell Phones) that can be rolled up, or folded. This will allow for much bigger screens that can fit in your pocket. This also means that one day you might be able to buy a newspaper…once. Then the news will be electronically distributed to your newspaper/screen. Talk about saving trees. Don’t get too excited just yet since these most likely won’t be available to the public for another few years.
Edible Chips
Next up we have Edible Chips. We all know what a computer chip is, well these little suckers are computer chips THAT YOU SWALLOW [Insert your "that's what she said" joke here]. After you swallow the chip, it will send data, in real-time, to an outside source (cell phone, watch, etc.) letting you know your heart rate, temperature, state of wakefulness or body angle. It can also let you know how you’re reacting to a new medication, giving you a percentage of how efficient it is. If edible chips are successful they could change how medicine is prescribed and how we take the drugs.
Bluetooth 3.0
Bluetooth is a form of wireless connection, for those of you who don’t know. It connects two devices over the air, like cell phone to cell phone, or computer to computer. Right now almost all cell phones have Bluetooth version 2.0. Bluetooth 3.0 was announced a few months ago and is a big deal to the technology world because of how fast it will be. Bluetooth cannot be used properly because it isn’t fast enough. But when Bluetooth 3.0 gets here in about a year, oh will it be speedy. Current Bluetooth (2.0) has speeds up to 2.1 Mbps, which is comparable to a non-3G connection on a cell phone. Well Bluetooth 3.0 will have speeds up to 24 Mbps, which is comparable to Wi-Fi speeds. These speeds would allow us to sync entire music libraries to our phones in a relatively short amount of time, all while using no cables!
SSD
Which stands for Solid State Drive, is the future of how we will store information. We’ve all used a flash drive, or whatever you want to call it. These contain flash memory sticks, which are the successor to modern hard drives. Hard drives use a disc and a laser writer to write information on to that disc. An SSD basically stores computer data in real-time, which means that the data can be found and accessed almost instantaneously, but with hard drives that laser has to find the data on the disc. SSD’s have huge advantages over hard drives, like faster reading and writing speeds, there are no moving parts, completely silent, and all around more reliable. In coming years, all our laptops, mp3 players, and phones will have SSD’s in them. Some already do, like the MacBook Air and the iPhone (No, Apple is not the only computer company to adopt this technology). The only problem with SSD’s is that they are freaking expensive! A 256GB SSD costs just under $600, while a 256GB Hard Drive only costs about $50. SSD’s are the future of how we store information, however that won’t be until they come down in price.
USB 3.0
We’ve all used a USB cord of some sort; either to upload your digital camera’s pictures to your computer, or to put that presentation on your flash drive. Transfer speeds for the current version of USB, 2.0, are not necessarily slow, but could be WAY faster. USB 3.0 was announced in August 2008, and we probably won’t see it in full swing until early 2010. USB 3.0 is ten times faster than 2.0. USB 3.0 can transfer a 27GB file in 70 seconds! USB 2.0 takes about a minute to transfer a 1GB file, this varies depending on your hard drive. The average movie file is about 700MB, with USB 3.0 it will take less than 2 seconds to transfer this file from your computer to your flash drive…2 SECONDS! This is ridiculously fast. Not only will this speed increase benefit the consumer, all transfer of data will be faster, meaning that companies will be more efficient. USB 3.0 also consumes less power than the current USB 2.0. Another cool thing about USB 3.0 is that is can transfer data both ways at the same time. If you’re transferring files from your hard drive to your computer and you try to transfer files the other way while the current transfer is still going, the new transfer will have to wait for the old one to finish. But not with USB 3.0. Data can be sent both ways through the USB 3.0 cable, instead of just one way. There’s one more great thing about USB 3.0, how much power it can carry. Current USB cables output 100 milliamps of power while USB 3.0 can carry 900 milliamps of power. This means if it takes one hour to completely charge your iPhone, then it will only take just under seven minutes with USB 3.0.