15 Current Technologies My Newborn Son Won't Use

I was surprised when a 23-year-old co-worker told me she didn't remember a time previously broadband Internet. At some point, her parents must have had dial-up, nevertheless she was so young that she doesn't even remember back that far. Wireless broadband won't dominate the home market until he's 8 to 10, yet my son won't remember a world where consumers pay for wired Internet connections.

Even today, 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution, latest standard in the mobile network technology) provides comparable download speeds and better upload speeds than cable Internet, however the cost of using mobile broadband all the time is prohibitive. At some point in the then and there few years, broadband providers are going to realize that giving everyone home antennas is more scalable than wiring and maintaining each street's network of fiber-optic cables. At that point, the paradigm will shift and it will be cheaper to purchase wireless than wired Internet. Clear already offers a 4G WiMax home Internet hub with unlimited service, even though it's not fast enough to compete with cable Internet.

The consumer point-and-shoot

Smartphone cameras are already killing the consumer point-and-shoot and the family camcorder. Unlike cameras, which most of us carry only when we think we might need to take pictures, smartphones are always with us. They offer all kinds of apps and filters for adjusting pictures on the fly and they allow us to share our photos and videos online as shortly as we take them. DSLRs and micro four-thirds cameras will remain with us, nevertheless within a few years, the average consumer won't own a dedicated camera at all.

As of 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 26 percent of U.S. homes had wireless phones only. By the time my son turns 5 in 2017, only a handful of old people and Luddites will continue to own house phones during everyone will likely use cellphones exclusively. By the time my son is 10, most businesses will have done away with their desk phones and saved a lot of money and hassle in the process.

Waiting for one's computer should the contingency arise is one of the great tech frustrations of the PC era, nevertheless my son will never know that pain. With the move toward always-on computing, future users will nearly never turn their computers off, instead waking them from sleep in a second or less. New operating systems will be able to install updates and patches without requiring a reboot. All in all, if for some reason, you do need to restart the computer, boots will take only a couple of seconds because of SSDs and fast-starting operating systems like Windows 8. "When I was your age, we had to wait up to two minutes for a computer to power on, and we liked it," I'll tell him.

When my son is ready for his own computer, the windows will be gone from Windows. Microsoft 's PC operating system will nevertheless exist, as will Mac OS X. However, in the at once few years, we'll say good bye to the window metaphor where each application you run is displayed in a draggable box that has a title bar and widgets.

The window metaphor

Microsoft has already signaled its intent to kill the window metaphor by making the tile-based Metro UI the default screen for Windows 8. How long previously Mac OS and even Ubuntu as well default to touch-friendly UIs that don't have tiny widgets?

My first computer, a TI 99, used cassette tapes to store data. My second computer used 5.25-inch floppy disks, and the third system had a combination of a 3.5-inch floppy drive and a small IDE hard drive. The then PC had a zip drive and a tape backup unit. Nevertheless, as different as these disks were, they all used the same magnetic platter research that's been popular since reel-to-reel tapes ruled the earth.

Within five years, the cost of adding capacitive touch capability to screens will be so small that every display, from large-screen TVs to laptops, will have it. More precise pointing devices just as the mouse and touchpad won't disappear overnight, however they'll likely fade away or become secondary input methods within the at once several years. Already with Windows 8, the user interface will support touch even if you don't necessarily need to use it all the time.

In 2011, Toshiba released the Qosmio F755 notebook, which uses its webcam to track your eye movements and serve up actually compelling 3D images, even though these are only optimized for a single viewer. Last year, phone vendors HTC and LG both launched handsets with glasses-free, stereoscopic 3D screens that weren't home theater quality, however were good enough for some three-dimensional fun. By the time my son is 10, large-screened devices like TVs will be able to offer a compelling glasses-free 3D experience to many viewers together.

When I was a child, the family TV didn't even have a remote control. We had to in fact get up and walk across the room to change the channel. By the time my son enters grade school, most of us will have moved on to either using our smartphones or a combination of gestures and voice commands to change channels.

The whole remember my parents'

I on the whole remember my parents' phone number, which hasn't changed in more than 30 years, however how many of us dial numbers to put it more exactly than just tapping a name in our contacts menu? With the advent of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) chat services like Skype, Google Talk and even Facebook audio chat, you can just dial someone by username. When my son is in high school, he'll be asking the pretty girl on the bus for her user ID, not her phone number.

In ancient times, people had to gather around their TVs at a set time each week to watch "Starsky and Hutch." At that time VCRs arrived and you could find out whether the Duke boys outsmarted Boss Hogg any time you wanted. DVRs now let us tape shows without using tapes, nevertheless because most TV networks make their shows available for free either via Web streaming or cable on-demand, we don't even have to record shows.