Discerning some trends from CES

In Tech Watch for Realtor magazine online’s February edition, I tried to highlight some more noteworthy introductions at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Here, I’ll briefly highlight a few emerging product with potential promise for mobile agents

CES always has its surprises, but more than anything the show offers a compass on where technology is headed. One key to the future is the continuing refinement of flash memory technology, and the next generation of equipment it will empower. For example,the SD Association, representing more ethan 1,100 companies, announced agreements of a next standard, called SDXC, for flash memory cards with storage capacity of up to two terabytes(1 terabyte ==1,000GB) of data

When you can slip that kind of memory into a portable device of any kind, there’s simply more you can store and do. In fact, the implications of advances in flash memory are already evident in the growing selection of flash-based camcorders. With no moving parts , save their optics, these compact portable devices may be all you ned for photos and video.(Announcements from Canon, Sony

That is of course, if high res image capture isn’t already built in to your next generation smartphone. The newly announced palm Pre, with its its 3MP sensor, is already good enough for basic photos for the Web.

Last year, the miniature projection systems from the likes of 3M and Microvision , http://www.aboutprojectors.com/WowWee-Cinemin-Stick-projector.html
were among the show stealers at CES.

This time out we started to see potential applications of that technology in a range of devices like 3M’s MM200 and the Cinemin line coming this spring from WowWee.

Such projectors will be ideal for presentations on the road ,and get get around the small screen display which has been one of the real limits to many mobile handsets. One day with one of these, you could confidently leave a full sized notebook behind, and decide between a smartphone or net notebook as your mobile office.

One dedicated device which could go the way of all flesh: stand-alone GPS navigators. With GPS navigation a routine service offering from most cellular providers, and as as more smartphones offer GPS navigation as a standard feature or option, you have to wonder where the dedicated system will fit in the future. In the car seems most likely, and to secure that presence there has been a trend to improve the services which empower these devices.
If you live or work in a busy city, the most useful seem to be real time traffic updates now increasingly common with device/services bundles like TomTom Live, TeleNav Shotgun or the Dash Express (http://www.dash.net/product/traffic.php).