Can I ignore their invite?
“Can I be your friend?” might work as an ice-breaker among small children, but it’s not a question you hear often between adults, at least not outside of Las Vegas.
Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval need to share your neighbor’s power tools.
Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of the schoolyard.
Others may look back on the years 2000 to 2009 and remember elections, wars, global warming and Michael Jackson, but for gearheads like us, this was the decade that mobile tech grew up.
During the first decade of the 21st century, we saw a whole slew of new mobile technologies capture the public imagination: the smartphone, the MP3 player, the USB stick, touchscreens, Wi-Fi, 3G wireless, pocket camcorders, digital SLRs and more.
Thanks to these inventions, people got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence. Where we stand now, notebooks outsell desktop PCs, people spend more on mobile phones than on landlines, and portable game consoles outnumber the ones plugged into your TV cabinet.
Ten years ago, we would have been blown away by a cellphone with far more computing power and memory than the average PC had in 1999, along with a built-in camera and programs to manage every aspect of our lives. Ten years from now, the iPhone and its ilk will be antiques.
Over the next decade, the evolution of computing and the Internet will produce faster, increasingly intelligent devices. More of our possessions will contain sensors and computers that log our activities, building digital dossiers that augment our memories, help us make decisions and tame information overload.
Such ideas may sound futuristic and excessive today, and technological predictions are notoriously off-base. Short-term forecasts tend to assume too much change, and long-term forecasts underestimate the possibility of sudden, major shifts.
2010 is just a blink away. So it’s time to round up what has 2009 gave us. Uh, I mean gadgets.
Let’s just face the fact that some of these may not reach our shore here. But hey, it still rocks from where it comes. OK here we go.
Another series of my vertical illustration. This time it shows data about who’s making money off the iPhone.
Hi, I'm Robin. I write this blog to share my knowledge, news, and all the fun to everyone. Hope you enjoy!
