Bye bye 2007. What's 2008 got to offer?
31 December 2007

"A Vista service pack is also on the cards, but who gives a flying fig about that anyway? Expect to see Apple's computer share go into double figures as Microsoft's continues to slide."

So another year is over and in my sad, techie obsessed world thoughts inevitably turn to the coming year. So what gadgets and innovcations will 2008 bring us, I wonder?

2007 gave me my Mac Pro, a touch screen iPod, the Adobe Creative Suite version 3 and the long awaited OS X Leopard. What's up for 2008 then?

First off in two weeks time the technology year kicks off with CES in Las Vegas and the annual Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This is always a good start to the year and there are strong rumours that Apple will launch a flash (rather than hard drive) based laptop computer to add to its already strong lineup. Flash storage will offer battery life far greater than existing notebooks and will also offer a smaller form factor. Although this isn't likely to be a computer for your pocket (leave that to the iPhone and iPod Touch) this is likely to be a whole new area of development implemented in the way that only Apple can. Could we possibly see a touch screen on the device? I wonder if it'll have a touch screen "keyboard" that can double as a graphics tablet or any other input area that a programmer defines? How cool would that be? You heard it here first!

Elsewhere, high def TVs will continue to sell well, no doubt and there may be progress on my biggest bug-bear about the whole flat-screen-high-def transition (ie, that there's NO FREE HIGH DEF CONTENT and that people are watching standard def pictures on their new HD tellies and thinking that, somehow, the picture is better?!?!?). Channel 4 are about to launch Channel 4HD - a free-to-air high def channel to add to the only other free high def offerting from the BBC. However, you still need a Sky HD box and Sky HD subscription or a Virgin V+ box to watch these channels so they're hardly free-to-air. More to the point, the BBC and ITV's Freesat service will launch in the Spring offering a set top box capable of decoding true HD pictures and finally offer us all a way of getting HD content without having to pay through the nose for it. At least it'll give Sky and Virgin some competition until enough bandwidth is available for Freeview to do likewise.

I'm expecting the High Def format wars to be resolved during early 2008 with Blu-Ray coming out on top. Despite this, I still think that internet based services will make all this arguing irrelevant. Here's hoping for an Apple TV update at Macworld to help things along a bit!

Gadget-wise, mobile phone companies have now had a year to develop challengers to Apple's iPhone so expect to see some of those appear during the year but also expect Apple themselves to launch a 3G version of the device and continue to enhance the firmware (at the time of writing a new version is being tested).

On the computer side of things, Mac OS X will see it's next patch (version 10.5.2) during January offering some welcome tweaks to Stacks but by the end of the year we could've seen a further 3 or 4 patches and lots more people migrating. A Vista service pack is also on the cards, but who gives a flying fig about that anyway? Expect to see Apple's computer share go into double figures next year too as Microsoft's continues to slide.

Look out for more interactive web sites during 2008 as Spry, jQuery and other AJAX frameworks take hold. Expect your surfing to be old fashioned if you've got Javascript turned off in your browser.

I'm hoping that news of faster broadband will surface next year. It's about time that ADSL2+ was adopted and BT are already rolling this out. This will give speeds of around 24MB and even if no-one achieves the maximum (which if "up to 8MB" is anything to go by is highly likely) any improvement has got to be good as we all attempt to watch more video on-line.

Bye bye 2007. It's been fun, but it's time to move on!