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Technological Innovation Won't Take A Break In 2009

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By VICTOR GODINEZ and ANDREW D. SMITH The Dallas Morning News

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 5, 2009

DALLAS - Here are some cool new products and applications tech buyers can expect to see in 2009:

AT&T

AT&T in 2009 plans to focus on how customers interact with their various electronic devices, letting users seamlessly transfer data among televisions, smart phones and computers all on the same home network.

Check your e-mail on the TV, forward a link to your iPhone of a map embedded in one of those e-mails, and then, while on the road, view a live video feed from a highway camera to see what traffic looks like up ahead.

Femtocells

A femtocell is like Wi-Fi for cell phones.

A box plugs into your home broadband connection and creates a strong, reliable, wireless cellular network in your house or office.
Sprint Nextel Corp. already offers its Airave femtocell to subscribers.

Other providers are coming soon - AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. are testing their own devices - and will even offer high-speed 3G coverage, meaning the time of cellular dead spots inside buildings could be coming to an end.
Initial costs are high - you'll have to pay for the machine and a small monthly fee on top of your existing cell phone bill - but those will come down over time.

Laptops
RadioShack Corp. recently rolled out an interesting concept: a laptop with 3G access that's subsidized like a cell phone.

As with a cell phone, though, you have to sign a two-year contract to get the high-speed AT&T 3G Internet connection.

If RadioShack's $99 Acer Aspire One netbook (normally about $400) takes off, don't be surprised to see other netbook makers copy the strategy.

Don't be surprised to see more netbooks, period.

Sales of the mini-laptops surged from 1 million units in 2007 to an estimated 14 million in 2008, a trend everyone in the computer industry has noticed.

Mobile App Stores

The biggest innovation on the mobile front next year probably won't be any one product.

Instead, it will probably be a discovery that millions of smart phone owners are about to make: Software downloads can make phones exponentially more useful than they are out of the box.

The catalyst for this new mindset was Apple, which launched an "App Store" for iPhone owners last summer.

Expect something similar from Microsoft soon - and expect 2009 to be the year that mainstream users start thinking of cell phones as portable computers that happen to have a voice function.

Windows 7

Whether you love Windows Vista or hate it, a new operating system from Microsoft is a major event in the tech world.

Microsoft hasn't provided a launch date, but most expect the new OS - simply titled Windows 7 - to ship in 2009.

While Windows Vista was a fairly radical overhaul of Windows XP, 7 will be a more incremental change, streamlining and tightening Vista's performance while retaining much of its visual style.

In fact, Microsoft has already promised that Windows 7 will run just fine on those low-power netbooks everybody is buying, a task Vista was never suited for.

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