Donnie Jenkins, Tech Talk

It’s a tradition at the end of the year to develop ideas to improve ourselves. One of mine that always bites the dust is a promise to myself to spend more time doing anything other than surfing the Web. In the words of that great philosopher John Dvorak of pcmag. com, “Yeah, right.”

Since the resolutions don’t work out so well, I thought I would instead examine some New Year’s revolutions. These are trends and events I believe will occur this year, including my wish list for what I’d like to see.

1. The personal computer and television will continue to get closer to convergence. For years, companies have tried to get the Internet and TV to get along and to literally join each other somehow. One such effort by tech giants Yahoo and Intel may be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show this month. Broadly called Internetenabled television, the idea is to integrate Web staples such as socalled widgets into hardware such as televisions and hybrid devices. A widget is usually a self-contained program that does one primary task.

Anyone who has used a personal video recorder such as a TiVo, which allows you to pause live programming, would probably find a use for such a service.

The trick here will be to integrate the new features in such a way as to allow the person watching to completely control how they use it. Perhaps the service could offer widget time shifting, including the ability to bookmark a widget or offering much like we bookmark a Web site in our browsers.

2. Streaming video will become mainstream: I subscribe to Netflix, the DVD delivery service. My main reason for doing so is that they offer thousands of videos online that you can watch in your browser. This is my favorite new Web development, video on demand anytime you want it. Their selection is improving all the time, and the quality is fantastic. You can customize your viewing preferences and rate your experience, allowing them to tailor their offerings to your exact taste.

3. The switch to digital television will initially be a train wreck, but will eventually get sorted out: I am already getting e-mails from people who have purchased converter boxes and are having early problems with them.

The nature of these problems tell me that we’ll have a bumpy ride for a while for those folks who don’t have cable or satellite subscriptions. It will take a while to get it all figured out, but as usual it will all work out over time.

4. More and more features will be integrated into smart phones: Phones such as the iPhone and Blackberry Storm are all in one wonders. They play music and video and allow web surfing. This year we’ll see GPS and other stand-alone services such as credit card transaction software become part of these phones in the mainstream.

5. Wireless HDMI will become common: HDMI is the digital connection found on HDTVs and other digital equipment. Several companies are working on wireless standards which will allow you to stream digital content anywhere in your home.

Video is a special problem because of its size and the need to compress and decompress it using what is called a codec. There are several products upcoming that look promising. The key here is to get the cost down enough to attract a mainstream market, something no one has done so far.

6. Finally, Microsoft will release Windows 7 this year, and it had better be spectacular to get past the Vista fiasco.

Early reviews of the prerelease versions are good, which is promising. Watch also for updates in the Mac OS, possibly including some 3D features.

E-mail Donnie Jenkins at donniejenkins@yahoo.com