Harry McCracken Rounds Up the Year In Tech

Velcroman1 writes "Windows got less annoying. Smartphones became smarter. The Internet continued to change entertainment for the better. All in all, it was a good year for technology and the folks who use it. Harry McCracken, the brains behind Technologizer and the former editor-in-chief of PC World, reveals his picks and pans for the most interesting tech stories of the year."

Comments

Not big stories.

[Darkness404]

While obviously Snow Leopard and Windows 7 were big deals, there are a lot more game changers and important things out there. The ION platform is a big thing, its already used in a few HTPC setups and I expect it to grow even more in 2010. The cheap full laptops are also going to be big things. Its hard to beat a laptop with a 15 inch screen, a 2.2 ghz CPU and 2 gigs DDR2 and a decent sized HDD for $300 or less. A cheap netbook is good for a geek, kids or the businessman. However, for the elderly, those unemployed and looking for a good laptop, and students, these cheap laptops are going to help change the market.

Re:Not big stories.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that Intel is rapidly giving Atoms without on-die graphics the nerve pinch, ION's long-term prospects look grim(ok, VIA might get around to shipping something, 18 months from now). If they want to offer anything for the Pine Trail Atoms, it will need to hang off the PCIe bus(and, given that the Pine Trails have an on-die memory controller, and relatively anemic off-chip I/O, quite possibly dedicated video RAM) That'll raise the cost significantly.

For strict low-end HTPC use, I'd expect that most people will just suck it up and pair the new Atom with a dedicated video accelerator like Broadcom's offering. That will be near useless for 3D graphics; but it'll get you full h246 acceleration for absolute peanuts.

At price(and power draw, though that matters less for something on AC power) points just above that, you run into the combination of a low-end Athlon and an integrated Radeon. Better CPU performance than anything Atom, some GPU capability, and full video acceleration.

Above that, you get into the land of normal desktop processors and, if desired, discrete video cards. Unless Nvidia can somehow get an interconnect licence out of Intel, or get VIA up to speed, and soon, ION is doomed. Which is a pity, Intel's graphics offerings in the area are pitiful, and their tactics could hardly be described as fair; but that doesn't help Nvidia much.

Enter AT&T's Bogus Smartphone Business "Strate

[ausoleil]

AT&T Wireless seems to be a company intent on hari-kari. It has sold its customers the wildly popular iPhone, and now blames its customer base for using the device:

AT&T made more threatening remarks aimed at iPhone users ("Wireless data hogs") who use too much "audio and video streaming" today. AT&T Wireless CEO Ralph de la Vega told attendees at a UBS conference in New York...

Wireless data hogs who jam the airwaves by watching video on their iPhones will be put on tighter leashes, ...[AT&T] will also give high-bandwidth users incentives to "reduce or modify their usage."

Just 3 percent of "smart" phone users are consuming 40 percent of the network capacity, de la Vega said, adding that the most high-bandwidth activity is video and audio streaming. Several applications on the iPhone provide nonstop Internet radio.

De la Vega also defended the network's performance, saying testing showed that AT&T's third-generation, or 3G, network was faster than that of competitors, and that major problems are concentrated in New York and San Francisco, which are packed with smart phone users.

AT&T has already pushed iPhone Tethering back into 2010 with no hard date in sight.

Obviously, these threats by De la Vega are not going well with its customer base, one who has grown increasingly surly. While the first of Dan Lyons' "Operation Chokehold" customer protests may have been unsuccessful, it would be easy to see how iPhone/AT&T customers could find other ways to show their dissatisfaction. And surely, all of this has been noted and noted well in Cupertino at Apple HQ. The last thing it wants in the face of increased competition for smartphone sales is a customer revolt towards an antagonistic company. That in and of itself would suggest that Apple must surely be planning to not renew its exclusivity contract with AT&T, not without some contractually specified infrastructure improvements at the very least.

While other smartphone brand owners and carriers may smugly note that they do not have these problems, they would be wise to note this emerging issue. As Droid and other smartphones become more widely accepted and used on other carrier networks, it is seemingly inevitable that they too will join the ranks of the disconnected unless they happen to be nearby a traditional wireless router that they can connect their pocket device to.

The bottom line is that adoption may well bring about data caps with high charges for heavy users, simply because there are not that many providers and should they note that one sees a revenue increase by raising its rates, they can easily follow suit. This in turn will slow the adoption of broadband migration to smartphone devices at least until compression and connection technologies catch up and surpass this problem.

Re:some boring/predictable stuff in that list

[DesScorp]

Boring and Predictable is what IT is now. We're in a mature period, where very little is actually revolutionary. "Game Changer" depends on public viewpoint and impact, and in that regard, I'd say the last real game changer was the iPhone, and that was years ago.

A bit early to celebrate Windows 7?

[dpbsmith]

It's only been out since October 22nd, 2009. It seems a bit early to say that it "is far more likely than Vista to run decently on the computer you already own."

We'll find out, because I believe that upgrades to Windows 7 are far more likely to be attempted than Windows upgrades usually are. Because of Vista's problems, because of concern that Vista will almost be an orphaned product--not by Microsoft but by all the vendors developing for Windows, and because the listed system requirements for Windows 7 are the same as for Vista, a lot of organizations are going to want to move swiftly to put Vista behind them. Corporations will want to standardize. The safest choice is to throw out the computers with Vista installed and buy new ones with Windows 7 preinstalled, but the Vista computers are a little too new for that. The remaining choices are to drag feet on moving to Windows 7 or to upgrade, and this time I think many will opt to upgrade.

So, we will see.

I hope it will turn out that upgrading to Vista is smooth. Microsoft has shown that it can do it: the transition from MS-DOS 3.3 to MS-DOS 5.0 was a model of what an OS upgrade should be.

But it is early for McCracken to be celebrating it as an established fact, rather than a reasonable expectation based on listed system requirements and Windows 7's reputation as being not much more than a service pack.