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Ten techs to watch in 2009

Posted on 2 Jan 2009 at 12:29

Live Mesh provides a remote portal on to your files: add a folder on any PC to your Mesh - it's a simple right-click away - and you can then open a view onto it from any other internet-connected PC. Open the document; work on it as normal; close it again - no explicit synchronisation is needed. It eliminates the nightmare of synching files taken back and forth and worked on between different PCs, and Her Majesty's Government might like to take a look, too. With no flash drives to be left on trains, data is less likely to fall into the wrong hands. As long as you trust Microsoft, of course.

With Live Mesh, the contents of your folders are uploaded to Microsoft's servers (there's currently a 5GB limit) and changes are replicated across all the Mesh-connected PCs as soon as they go online, almost in real time. If a file becomes corrupted, the corruption will be replicated across all Mesh-connected PCs, so don't treat it as a standalone backup tool. As long as you bear that caveat in mind, it's a genius piece of software.

9. MULTITOUCH EVERYWHERE

The keyboard and mouse have been written off more times than David Beckham's England career. But having comfortably seen off the threat of speech and handwriting recognition, the duo's 30-year monopoly as the computer interface of choice could finally be under threat from multitouch screens.

Microsoft has thrown its weight behind alternatives in the past (Tablet PCs, anyone?), but multitouch is poised to become the centrepiece of Windows 7. And this isn't another of those cases of Microsoft trying to convince the rest of the industry to follow one of its whims: HP and Dell have already implemented touchscreen layers on top of Vista in their Touchsmart PCs and Latitude Tablet PCs respectively. The ever-innovative Asus, meanwhile, is already talking about a multitouch Eee PC running on Windows 7 by the end of next year.

We're not suggesting you're about to dump the keyboard for rattling out emails or documents, but there will literally be a more hands-on approach to tasks such as photo editing and web surfing.

It isn't only PCs that are getting the touch treatment. RIM and Nokia have both been dragged into the touchscreen era by the Apple iPhone, with the BlackBerry Storm bringing another innovation to the game: tactile touchscreens. This means users will feel a physical "click" when their finger taps the screen, and this could be the technology that finally makes onscreen touch keyboards bearable, according to our Real World mobile expert, Paul Ockenden.

10. THE GOOGLE OS

This is very much our outside bet - the 20-1 shot that will surprise us as much as anyone if it romps over the line: 2009 will be the year that Google launches its first desktop operating system.

Why? One word: netbooks. The increasingly popular mini-laptops have brought Linux into the mainstream, and with Google's army of developers it wouldn't take long to bring out a Linux distro that meets its specific needs.

The Asus Eee PC has proven how easy it is to make Linux palatable, simply by putting a GUI layer over the OS. Google could develop a user-friendly desktop with functions linked to its vast repertoire of software and services, such as internet (Chrome), email (Gmail), photos (Picasa), office (Google Docs) and video (YouTube). And with Gears support integrated into more of Google's products, the netbook wouldn't even need to be online to be usable.

There are many reasons why building an OS makes no sense for Google. But they said that about the internet browser...

Author: PC Pro staff