So it is the end of another year. As far as IT went it was a slowish year. The floods in Thailand reduced the hard drive availability and they are at record prices now. It was a year where disposable income was not all that easy to find for many.
As for my predictions because things were slower than expected things did not reach some of the marks I had predicted. Monitors reached 24 inch as the base standard but 27 inch models were easy to find and even larger ones. I met a number of people using dual monitor setups but this was not all that common, except in the IT profession. I went back to a single 27" fo0r myself, until I get a bigger computer table that is.
The SLR was still selling and a few more of the intermediate models appeared with intermediate lenses. That did not diminish the remaining focus on the point and shoot compact models however. The optical lens technology was pushed out a few numbers and 12x optical lens offerings were more common. CCD sensors are well into the 16 MP territory now with a few a lot higher than that. As expected low light shooting improved in some manufacturers for both SLR and compact cameras.
The 6 TB drive did not appear but 4 TB was available. USB 3 started to become more common on motherboards and there are plenty of USB thumb drives and portable drives. SATA 3 is also a lot more common these days so I managed to get those predictions correct. I underestimated the biggest thumb drive with the 2 TB model coming out while I predicted 1 TB.
As expected Blu-ray did not move much at all this year but HD downloads increased quite a bit. mkv, mp4 and a few other formats are providing 5.1 channel DTS sound and good quality for a 4GB (or less) file size. As expected apart from WD no media player appears from any of the big electronics manufacturers. I think that this is a HUGE mistake but that hasn't stopped them from making mistakes in the past.
AS expected 6-8 MB is now very common in PCs with 12 and 16 getting close to common sizes as well. Single core chips are all but gone with even mobile phones sporting dual core CPUs these days. 2 TB notebook drives also appeared this year as predicted. Not much above 4-6 core so far and yes the software needs to catch up with multi core technology.
Printers and scanners hardly moved in technology this year with the multi-purpose units becoming very common now. Entry level prices for black and white laser models dropped to under $50 with colour laser models well under $200. Wireless connectivity did indeed becomes more common with even the lower prices models supporting wireless printing. The technology is still a little flakey but it works. Wireless also picked up as a common connectivity method with many of the younger generation not even connecting a fixed line at home unless they were after a fixed line Internet connection.
As expected Windows 7 did indeed take more of the operating system market with those who had gone for Vista kicking themselves for not waiting. I finally retired my last XP machine with the plan to use a virtual machine (not Microsoft's) if I need full XP compatibility. VMWare is the way to go is you want to move down that route.
As expected Windows & mobile did not take off. Not so much because the OS was no good but rather that Microsoft didn't get out there and had no real competitors for the Android devices. Those that did get a Win 7 mobile device had good things to say about it.
Surprisingly this year the tablet market did make it through to the end of 2011 even being the 'best' present for Christmas. Samsung did well but could have done better but for the Apple law suits to block the Galaxy 10.1. Some were successful and Samsung fought back and blocked the sale of the iPhone and iPad in some countries. A stupid set of actions from Apple and it will cost them in the medium term.
Arrrrgh, no HD Wii game machine this year, rumours of one next year but they have waited too long I think. Faith in print media generally fell this year with more people looking to blogs for their news. This has caused governments to focus more on this news delivery system with some politicians leveraging this technology.
As expected no major label really made any progress with digital distribution of media and the pirates did indeed continue to provide a dizzy array of items to the general public. Every new version of DRM was cracked almost immediately and more artists start selling their own materials directly. No real movement in media players Digital radio starting to make some headway but AM and FM are around for quite a while yet. No new battery technology appeared and of course no real standardized cable connections.
There were a number of patent fights and the usual stupid attempts to patent general domain stuff from the Americans. The rest of the world should simply no longer recognize a US patent. Malware and hacker attacks were well represented this year with Anonymous and associated groups hacking into all manner of sites and grabbing large amounts of personal data. Stuxnet 2 was identified. IPv6 did not really grab hold but it won't be long now.
So 2011 was a slow year and China did indeed slow down. I'll have some more on that in my New Year article.
So given the slow year I didn't do that poorly in my predictions for 2011.
I hope that 2012 is a great year for all the readers.
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