Links 2 the Future

An asteroid just came very, very close to hitting Earth

2011-06-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

Earlier this afternoon, an asteroid came reeeeeal close to hitting Earth. How close? It was well within the orbits of our GPS satellites. Yeah, that close.

Luckily, scientists were able to track the rock and knew that it wouldn't be hitting us, which is nice. Nobody freaked out too much because the chances are good that the asteroid would have burned up in the atmosphere if it had been more on target. But still!

They were also able to image the asteroid as it buzzed us, which you can see above. Pretty cool! But seriously, next time we've gotta have Bruce Willis and his team of oil drillers at the ready to take these things out.

If your planning on switching to Verizon.... Hurry up!

2011-06-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

Having a hard time wrapping your head around the upcoming changes to Verizon's smartphone data plans? We just got all the dirty details dropped in our laps. Charts, e-mails, the whole kit and kaboodle, folks.

Let's start with what you see above. That's the official chart from the official training document (which you can see in full after the break.) As previously rumored, smartphone plans will start at 2GB for $30 a month, with $10 per gigabyte if you go over. There also are 5GB/$50 and 10GB for $80 plans. Unlimited plans are dead. These rates apply to 3G smartphones and 4G LTE smartphones.

Mobile hotspot access will cost $20 a month for 2GB of data.

Other points to note (many of which are detailed in an internal e-mail we've posted after the break):

If you have Verizon's $29.99 unlimited data plan, you'll be able to keep it after July 7.
You'll also be able to keep the $29.99 unlimited plan when you upgrade to a new phone. (No word on if there's a pricing difference or when that policy could change.)
If you add a line to an existing account, you'll not be able to chose the $29.99 unlimited data plan.
If you're a new customer between now and July 7, you'll still be able to choose the $29.99 plan.

So if you're in the market for a Verizon phone and want to get in on the current unlimited plans before the major changes take effect, you've got two weeks, folks.

Battery goo is like gas for electric cars, but better

2011-06-07T01:36:00.000-07:00

Vial of battery goo with a prototype battery behind

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Electricity is nothing like gas. You can't just pump a tank full of it into your electric car, which means that we're reduced to lengthy charge times or inefficient compromises likebattery swap stations. MIT researchers may have come close to solving this problem with a battery goo that you can pump just like gas.

They're calling this black sludge "Cambridge crude," and it's really two different types of goo, each holding charged particles suspended in semi-liquid electrolyte, sort of like how quicksand is comprised of sand particles suspended in water. There's anode goo, and there's cathode goo, and when the two goos are separated by a goo-separating membrane, charge moves from one goo over to the other goo, generating current to power your car.

When all the charge has been used up, you can pull over to a goo station, which will suck out your used goo and pump new goo back in. Or, when you get home, you can plug your car into a wall socket and recharge your goo that way. So it's like having all the advantages of being able to pump gas, with the added advantage of being able to fill up at home, too.

And it gets better. The goo batteries are cheaper to build than conventional lithium-ion batteries, and they're not dependent on any particular goo chemistry, so as we get better at cooking up more efficient and tastier goo, we can just pump that in instead. The MIT team received a DARPA grant to make this all happen, and by 2013, they should have a reduced-scale system operational and serving as a prototype replacement for electric car batteries.

Giant Japanese tower sucks up wind to generate electricity

2011-05-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

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Japan has taken a recent interest in alternative forms of power generation, and one of their latest ideas is this 160 foot tall hexagonal tower that works twice as efficiently as conventional wind turbines, without giant spinning blades of death.

Now, I know what you're wondering. You're wondering why this tower contraption is necessary when we already have such good luck with regular old wind turbines, the ones that look like giant propellers. Well, besides being a menace to both birds and majestic vistas, my gut feeling is that since they look like giant propellers, they probably generate enough thrust to slowly but surely speed up the rotation of our planet until at some point in the future, days will last only minutes, minutes will last only seconds, and seconds will barely last long enough for you to wonder why the days are so short all of a sudden.

It's entirely possible that I'm dead wrong about all of that stuff, but why take the risk? And Japan, I assume, agrees with me, which is why this tower is designed to suck in wind from all directions at once, funneling it down a tunnel through the center of the structure and compressing it to spin turbines and generate electricity:

The tower can harvest wind energy over its entire surface area, and is about 2.5 times more efficient than a conventional turbine system while costing half as much to maintain. The design comes from Zena Systems, and they're planning to build it Fukuoka, Japan

Levitating train flies like a plane, no magnets involved

2011-05-12T08:52:00.000-07:00

Prototype of the proposed levitating Aero Train.

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This week at the at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics in Shanghai, China, a bunch of Japanese researchers led by Yusuke Sugahara at Tohoku University showed off a prototype transport that hovers inches above the ground without maglev rails. To put it into geeky Star Wars speak: this is the Landspeeder you're looking for.

Categorized as a "ground-effect vehicle," the unmanned plane-train uses fast-moving air and several plane wings to levitate itself above the ground. The plan is to use this prototype vehicle to create an Aero Train (below) that's capable of traveling at 124 miles per hour in a "U-shaped concrete channel."

As shown in the demo video (without the safety channel), the "train" looks wobbly a few times, but is generally stable at its slow speeds. Crank that speed up and stuff this sucker into a channel and who know's what it'll feel like eating dinner on this thing.

The prototype train has been in the works for a year and was presented at the IRCA 2011 in China as part of a study. I think it's incredible that people are still experimenting with ways to kill the wheel. No matter how you look at it, hover vehicles still make up a majority of the concept ideas that litter sci-fi entertainment. With that said, the first one to create a hover train or car that isn't rinky-dink will have DVICE's everlasting respect.

Yusuke Sugahara, via Spectrum

For the latest tech stories, follow us on Twitter at @dvice

Scientists could be months away from discovering antigravity

2011-05-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

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Scientists at CERN have announced that they've been able to trap 309 atoms of antihydrogen for over 15 minutes. This is long enough that soon, they'll be able to figure out whether antimatter obeys the law of gravity, or whether it's repelled by normal matter and falls "up" instead. It would be antigravity, for real.

While it's never been tested experimentally due to how difficult it is to create and store the stuff, it's disappointingly likely that antimatter will fall "down" just like regular matter. The thinking behind this is that antimatter (despite the "anti-") is made of regular ordinary energy, and even if it's got an opposite charge, it should still obey the same general rules as matter does. Antimatter falling up would mean a violation of the law of conservation of energy, among other things.

That said, if antimatter were to exhibit antigravity, it would go a long way towards explaining some of the peculiarities of our universe. For example, the universe is supposed to have just as much antimatter as it does matter, but we don't know where the antimatter is. If antimatter and normal matter repelled each other, it could mean that there are entire antimatter galaxies out there. Also, that repulsion would explain why the universe is not just expanding, but speeding up its expansion, something that's tricky to figure out when everything in the universe is always attracted towards everything else.

In either case, the team at CERN should be able to put the debate to rest within a couple months, when they plan to trap a blob of antihydrogen and then just watch it to see which way it falls. Down, and the laws of physics stay in place. Up, and you might just get that hoverboard you've always wanted.

UV light heals scratched polymer paint in 30 seconds flat

2011-04-23T16:41:00.000-07:00

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Go ahead, get your car and your laptop and your sunglasses all scratched up. A new "metallo-supramolecular polymer" can switch from a solid coating to a liquid under UV light, magically repairing scratches in less than 30 seconds.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve have developed a special polymer that changes its structure when exposed to UV light. It's specifically intended to be used on stuff that people own, from cars to furniture to gadgets. The polymer is made up of lots of tiny molecular chains, held together with a glue of metallic ions. When you shine a UV light on it, the metallic ions stop acting like a glue, and the chains separate into a liquid that fills in any cracks. Take the light away and everything turns solid and smooth again.

This process happens fast enough that you can just wave a handheld light over the surface you want to fix and it'll be good as new in about 30 seconds. And because of the properties of the polymer, you're not "using up" its fixing power every time you do this: you can scratch the same spot over and over and it'll just keep fixing itself right up.

The good news is that from the sound of things, the researchers are already in talks with a few different companies to get this stuff into the commercial market as soon as possible. When exactly that's gonna be is anyone's guess, especially considering that we've heard about this kind of thingonce or twice before, but hey, progress is progress.

Latest Duke Nukem: Forever trailer

2011-04-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

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Remember how we promised that Duke Nukem: Forever would be working overtime to earn that Mature 17+ rating from the ESRB? This new trailer lives up to the challenge: it's got violence, gore, violence, gore, gore, monster trucks, gore, and boobies.

Hey, did we mention that this trailer is NOT SAFE FOR WORK? 'Cause it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

You've been warned.

PS3 Games - E3 2011 - Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem: Forever comes out for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and PC on ~~May 3~~ ~~June 10~~ June 14.

G4, via Blastr

This one is for all my coffee lovers out there

2011-04-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

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The window of enjoyability for hot beverages is pretty small: you've got about 30 seconds of 'just right' between tongue meltingly hot and disappointingly lukewarm. Giant magic beans with liquid metal inside use the power of physics to simultaneously make hot things cooler and cool things hotter, prolonging that ideal temperature.

Coffee Joulies are stainless steel coffee beans with a special phase change metal inside of them. 'Phase change' just means that it's a metal that goes from solid to liquid and back again, but doing that is a lot of work, and the metal sucks up a substantial amount of heat when it melts. This means that when you drop one of these beans into hot coffee, the bean's insides will melt and the coffee will get cooler.

It gets better, too. The melted nugaty centers of those beans will slowly release their pent-up heat back into your coffee after they've melted, helping to keep it from getting all cold and gross. The upshot of all of this phase changing is that Coffee Joulies can cool your coffee down to a comfortable 130 or 140 degrees Fahrenheit three times faster, and then keep it at that temperature for about twice as long. And the better insulated your container is, the more effective the beans are.

If you're picky about your temperature of maximum enjoyment, you can add or subtract beans to fine-tune their cooperative performance. By the way, yes, they're shaped like coffee beans, and they're sort of supposed to be for coffee, but they'll work on just about anything that needs to stay warm besides a vaguely gross-tasting brown sludge that makes people nutty.

Coffee Joulies are currently on Kickstarter and have unsurprisingly blown way past their funding goal, but there's still plenty of time to pre-order a set of five beans for $40.

Holographic display table is everything 3D should be

2011-03-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

We don't have 3D like Avatar yet, but we're getting close.

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Back in December, we saw some of Zebra Imaging's impressive full-color holographic prints. With funding from DARPA, Zebra has been able to develop and electronic version of the same technology, embodied in an actual glasses-free 3D holographic projector table.

DARPA started funding their "Urban Photonic Sandtable Display" back in 2005, and it's taken until now for the program to produce the utterly fantastical platform that it was shooting for, namely:

Color, real-time, 3D holographic displays with up to 12 inches of visual depth. The technology enables 360-degree viewing by a team of 20 people without 3D glasses or goggles.

As we've seen, this isn't simply a 3D image. It's a full color 360 degree high definitionhologram, meaning that you can walk all the way around the display and view it from any angle you want. And not just view it, but actually see the scene from that perspective. Plus, the implication of phrases like "real-time" and "interactive" implies that the display is capable of dynamically refreshing itself to some extent (although it doesn't sound like it's yet capable of full-motion).

These displays will at first be put to work for the military, but Zebra Imaging also wants to get them into the 3D entertainment and gaming markets, where viewers can "escape into lifelike, three-dimensional entertainment and games that explode with full-color, true-3D realism." Sounds good to me, now how much am I gonna have to pay to get one of these in my living room?

Check out a little reminder of how incredible Zebra's holograms are in the vid below.

Invisible solar panel screen charges your phone all the time

2011-03-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

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A transparent photovoltaic film that lives on top of traditional displays could provide substantial amounts of power to mobile devices. By substantial, we mean that as long as you spend enough time outside, you might never have to charge your phone ever again.

A French company called Wysips has somehow managed to create a 100-micron thin film that, while essentially invisible, can produce enough power from sunlight to fully charge a cellphone in about six hours. This translates into about 30 minutes of talk time per hour of sunlight, which is three times better than those bulky cases with traditional solar panels on the back.

Cellphones are the most obvious application for this technology, there's really nothing preventing every single gadget with a battery and a screen from taking advantage from a trickle of extra power, and you can start looking for consumer devices with this technology integrated into their screens within the next 12 months. For high drain devices the battery boost will certainly be less noticeable, but there's nothing wrong with an extra five or 10 minutes or whatever of plug-freedom.

A bottle of wastewater could be powering your house by next year

2011-03-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

Water plus sunlight equals hydrogen plus oxygen equals electricity, in this efficient artificial plant.

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By mimicking the essential process that allows plants to produce energy, an MIT researcher has managed to create electricity out of water more efficiently than conventional solar cells, to the point where one and a half bottles of wastewater could power an entire house for a day.

Plants, being extremely clever, somehow manage to use sunlight to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen. They combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to make sugar (which is what I would do, 'cause sugar is good stuff), but we humans have been trying to figure out for about a century how to skip the sugar step and just recombine that oxygen and hydrogen back into water to generate electricity.

Daniel Nocera, a chemistry and engineering researcher at MIT, has come up with an artificial "leaf" that uses cobalt and phosphate to split water molecules using nothing but sunlight. When the oxygen and hydrogen are recombined, they make electricity at an efficiency higher than that of traditional solar cells, and it's easy to just store the gases to be recombined later in a fuel cell when the sun doesn't happen to be shining.

Nocera has just teamed up with Tata Group to work towards commercializing this technology. By sometime next year, the goal is to have a cheap power plant about the size of a refrigerator that could generate enough power with some sun and a bottle and a half of water (wastewater, even) to power a small home for a day. And it only scales up from there, apparently:

"Nocera estimates that the world consumes 14 terawatts (TW) of power today. By 2050, it will need 16TW. If his solution works, said Nocera, it would need a swimming pool full of water every day to meet the world's electricity needs."

While I'd really like to believe that, I'm not entirely sure how you get from one and a half bottles of water per house to a swimming pool for the entire planet short of using antimatter. Hmm, maybethat's the secret that plants have been hiding for a billion years.

Live Mint, via Fast Company

First glasses-free 3D smartphone arrives on AT&T

2011-03-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

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Here we go. It's smartphone season and everybody's going for dual-core this and four-inch screen that. This puppy right here is taking a page from Nintendo's 3DS — the LG Thrill 4G will be the first U.S. smartphone to boast a glasses-free 3D screen.

It's been a big wave this week for AT&T, but luckily for fans of LG and Android the Thrill 4G will be landing. The Thrill 4G's main attraction is obviously its glasses-free 3D 4.3-inch screen and dual 5-megapixel cameras capable of shooting 3D photos and high definition 720p video. If 3D is not your cup of tea, 2D recording will top out at full HD 1080p resolution.

Under the hood you'll find a dual-core 1GHz processor, 8GB of internal storage and an included 16GB microSD card. As its name implies, the Thrill 4G will also be a 4G smartphone with which you can expect blazing download and upload speeds.

Pricing and availability have yet to be announced, with AT&T only hinting at a release in the coming months, but overall the Thrill 4G sounds like a slick and powerful smartphone. What do you think? Does glasses-free 3D have a better chance at surviving than regular 3D that require glasses?

Update: Check out our hands-on with the Thrill for more, as well as our coverage of the Thrill's main contender, Sprint and HTC's EVO 3D

AT&T, via Hothardware

Greatest March Madness plays lovingly recreated in Lego

2011-03-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

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Are you suffering from March Madness fever? Well if you do get bored and want to relive some of the tournament's classic moments, check out this video showing four of the greatest moments in NCAA tournament history, only Lego-ized.

The detail in each clip is impressive, getting not only the moves down pat, but even the uniforms and jersey numbers.

Clip 1 shows Christian Laettner's overtime buzzer beating turnaround from the 1992 Kentucky vs Duke game, perhaps the greatest moment in March Madness history.

Clip 2 is Chris Webber's phantom time out call from the 1993 North Carolina vs Michigan national championship game. Note the fan in the stands with the "this won't count anyway" sign. A reference to Michigan's subsequent disqualification following the player payments scandal.

Clip 3 is Tyus Edney's coast to coast game winning drive from the 1995 UCLA vs Missouri game.

And finally clip 4 is Zoubek's intentionally missed free throw followed by Hayward's half-court near miss from last year's championship between Duke and Butler.

Hopefully there will be more classic moments like these during this year's tournament.

YouTube, via Deadspin.com

X-51A hypersonic Waverider to try for Mach 6 on Tuesday

2011-03-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

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Last May, the X-51A Waverider fired up a scramjet engine and boosted itself to a hypersonic Mach 5. The Air Force was hoping for Mach 6, and, next week, the military will unleash this beast for another flight.

The X-51A Waverider uses a scramjet engine, which uses no moving parts at all but can (hypothetically, at least) achieve speeds anywhere from Mach 12 to Mach 24. Mach 24 is, if you're counting, just north of 18,000 miles per hour, which would get me from my house in SF to the DVICE office in NYC in under 10 minutes, which is only about 8 minutes longer than my normal daily commute from bed to couch.

During the last test, the Waverider managed to achieve Mach 5, but it took longer to get there than engineers had hoped, and the test flight was terminated a minute and a half early. And by "terminated," they mean crashed into the ocean. Data from that flight revealed that the vehicle gets so hot from friction with the air that the engine actually grows in size by nearly an inch, and this (plus other factors) may have caused a seal to fail. The remaining test vehicles have been beefed up to keep this from happening again.

On March 22, an X-51A will be carried up to 50,000 feet slung underneath the wing of a B-52. It will be dropped, and a booster rocket will fire up to get the Waverider up to Mach 4.5, which is when the scramjet kicks in. The booster rocket is jettisoned, and then the X-51A goes hypersonic and we'll see what the vehicle can really do.

Below, you can watch an Air Force video about the previous test, giving more details and footage of the X-51A. And we've also got a gallery full of extra pics of this futuristic vehicle that somehow also exists in the present.

Boeing, via U.S. Air Force

Methane Rainstorms on Titan

2011-03-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

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Saturn's moon Titan has a thick atmosphere of methane, which means it may have a geography very similar to ours. You know, plus methane and at extremely cold temperatures. But we're just now seeing the first images of the moon experiencing a mighty methane rainstorm.

What you're looking at appears to be a gigantic rainstorm and resulting flood near the equator. Those dark blotches are flooded areas, and the white wisps are methane clouds that have just dumped onto the surface.

Pretty cool! Although I still don't think I want to visit

Take a peek at the Droid 3

2011-03-16T23:20:00.000-07:00

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So, you just bought a Droid 2 and signed a 2-year contract, did you? I bet you really don't want to see the phone that will imminently make your new phone feel old, do you? Well, sorry.

Yes, this here is the next version of Motorola's Droid. It's got a slide-out keyboard much like its predecessors and doesn't look to be packing anything all too surprising, at least on the outside. On the inside, expect the latest version of Android and a modest spec bump from the Droid 2.

See, that wasn't so bad, was it?

Howard Forums via BGR

Nintendo 3DS to stream 3D movie trailers, have access to AT&T hotspots

2011-03-03T07:41:00.000-08:00

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If you pick up one of Nintendo's new 3D handhelds, the 3DS, you'll have more than a 3D gaming machine that doesn't require glasses; you'll also have something you can use to stream 3D movie trailers in a Starbucks. The future!

Nintendo is bringing an "eStore" to the 3DS, a place to stream 3D movie and game trailers and check out game screenshots. And hey, that'll be one place to see 3D trailers without having to go see a 3D movie, so that's cool.

As for the hotspots, Nintendo is teaming up with AT&T to allow 3DS users to connect to over 10,000 of AT&T's Wi-Fi hotspots, which are all over the place in locations such as Starbucks. So that's something!

Joystiq and Kotaku

Nokia surrenders, to start selling Windows phones

2011-02-13T17:37:00.000-08:00

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Nokia's had a tough go of it the last few years, losing tons of market share in both the high end (to Apple and Google) and the low end (to Chinese manufacturers). Now, they're giving up on running their own mobile OS and are going to start selling Windows phones.

It makes a certain amount of sense for both companies. Microsoft is way behind Apple and Google in getting their OS to market, so having a big hardware manufacturer on board will help get their phones out there. And Nokia can now focus on hardware instead of dedicating resources to an OS that nobody uses. We'll see how it all turns out.

Healing burns in a matter of days with the stem-cell gun

2011-02-05T20:19:00.000-08:00

Well, this is amazing: a new medical technique to treat burns involves spraying the affected area with the victims own stem cells, which results in major burns healing in a matter of days.

In the below video (warning: some nasty burn images in there), you can see the results of a man who received 2nd degree burns in a gasoline fire and was healed over the course of a weekend. A weekend! It seems like something out of a movie, but this is very real.

Teenager from Indiana makes homemade 'death-ray' with 5,800 tiny mirrors

2011-02-02T12:51:00.000-08:00

Everybody, say hello to the 19-year-old Eric Jacqmain — typical teenager during the day — "death-ray with intensity of 5,000 shining suns" builder by night. This boy is the next Dr. Evil.

How does a young lad like Jacqmain build a "death-ray" that's powerful enough to "melt steel, vaporize aluminum, boil concrete, turn dirt into lava, and obliterate any organic material in an instant?" By gluing 5,800 tiny mirror tiles on top of a fiberglass satellite dish and drilling a hole on the back to allow light to shine through a translucent piece of plastic.

Why did Jacqmain build a "death-ray?" To prove how powerful the energy the Sun emits really is. Jacqmain's invention is so simple, yet deadly, that we wonder why we've been frying ants with puny magnifying glasses all this time.

Sadly, Jacqmain's "R5800 Solar Death Ray" was destroyed in a shed fire by its own generated energy. Calling his death ray's destruction a "suicide," Jacqmain is planning to build a bigger, better version with 32,000 mirrors in the future. If I were the guy selling this kid all those mirrors, I'd be suspicious of his intentions. Nevertheless, we tip our hat off to you Jacqmain. Bra-vo

Giant holocube displays full-size holographic people

2011-01-31T12:50:00.000-08:00

This six foot tall holographic display system is large enough to display people at pretty close to life size. It could be your big screen holographic TV and your first holographic phone system, all in one.

With a 70" diagonal display, Holocube's holographic projection booth is capable of displaying full-size three-dimensional people, as long as they're fairly short. The display is transparent at the back so that you can walk around it and get the whole 3D effect, and at full 1080p resolution, it's essentially like having some kind of real person standing there inside a box that they can't get out of, which is how I prefer all of my social interactions anyway.

A hands-on with the long-awaited Playstation Phone

2011-01-26T23:19:00.000-08:00

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Engadget just got a hands-on with the long-rumored Playstation Phone, officially called the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, and it looks pretty slick.

This slider phone runs Android, has a 4-inch touchscreen and a 1GHz processor. When you slide the bottom part of the phone out, instead of the expected keyboard, you get Playstation controls (you can use the touchscreen for typing and dialing). It all in all looks like a solid device, especially for serious mobile gamers. With the iPhone's touchscreen being what holds it back from being a real-deal mobile gaming console for anything more than casual games, this solves that problem swimmingly.

Look for more details when Sony officially announces this bad boy.

Via Engadget

Can you name these 20 geeky things that happened online in 2010?

2011-01-24T11:18:00.000-08:00

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If you're the type of person who ~~wastes~~ spends hours online everyday ~~just looking at stuff~~ educating yourself, then all of that time spent could finally pay off. Illustrator McBess has created this cool drawing that shows 20 things that happened online in 2010, and he wants to know if you can figure them all out.

After several minutes of staring I could only name a few, but then I never waste my time looking at irrelevant stuff online (cough, cough). Remember, McBess is based in Britain, so some of the 20 could have been bigger deals in the UK than in the US.

Alas, this is not a competition, and the only prize on offer is bragging rights among your geeky friends for your profound knowledge of Internet memes. There are however a few posters of the drawing going to Sysygy's Twitter followers

2010-2011 will go down as the greatest tech years ever

2011-01-23T15:14:00.000-08:00

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No other two-year span in the history of consumer electronics has both wrought and promises as much radical change as last year and this new year. While there may have been years with one or two significant product introductions and advancements — 1920: the first radio broadcast, 1939: the introduction of TV, 1947: the invention of the transistor, 1982-83: the introduction of the CD and launching of the first cellphone systems — no two-year span has been as chuck full of potentially behavior-changing technology in television, digital imaging, car electronics, gaming and especially cellphones. There is so much happening on so many fronts, even I'm having trouble keeping up with it all.

But we can narrow our time frame even further — more like 18 months, from the near simultaneous introductions of the first 3D HDTVs and the iPad last spring to AT&T's pending launch of its 4G LTE network sometime this summer. In between — a series of stunning technological leaps.

Here's what I think has and will make 2010-2011 the most memorable tech years ever.

My seemingly hyperbolic pronouncement about 2010-2011's tech primacy does not come lightly. I am the unofficial historian for the Consumer Electronics Association (the folks who throw CES), am an elector to CEA's Hall of Fame and have written many of the inductee bios, and have written extensively about tech history, such as the development of video recording, the cellphone and the top 10 technological advancements of the last decade for American Heritage of Invention & Technology magazine.

The modern era also tends to lend itself to "most fruitful ever" because of the sheer range of technologies, but that doesn't minimize how much tech change we've experienced and will experience this year.

Of Tabs, Tape…

In the wake of the ridiculous success of the iPad and, to a lesser degree, Samsung's Galaxy Tab, everyone suddenly thinks they, too, can sell tablet PCs. Yes, 2011 will be the year of the tablet, but not in a good way. BlackBerry, Coby, Creative Labs, Dell, Lenovo, Motorola, NEC, Sylvania, Toshiba, Viewsonic and Vizio were among the familiar names unveiling Android-based tablets at CES, along with a bunch of companies neither I nor likely you have ever heard of or will hear from again. Aluratek? Augen? Cydle? Enspert? Gentouch? Naxa? Noah? Sungale?

Where's Acme? I'm sure Wile E. Coyote (super genius) wants to buy a tablet PC, and there's nothing like brand loyalty.

Madness.

Do any of these companies think we want to buy a tablet PC? No, we don't. What we want is an iPad. And even if we didn't want an iPad, how is anyone supposed to differentiate between these dozens of look-alike Android tablets? And with so many Android tabs to choose from, even anti-Apple consumers, drowning in a sea of competing Android tab specs, are likely to throw up their hands, surrender to the inevitable, and buy an iPad — if they buy any tablet at all.

And the same goes for all the no-name companies thinking we need ereader choices beyond Kindle, Nook or even Kobo.

2011 will be the year of the tablet and ereaders, all right — the tablet/ereader holocaust. What a stupid waste.

In the meantime, say goodbye to the end of videotape. No major camcorder maker makes tape-based models for the first time since the Sony Betacam was introduced in 1983.

And while there may be nothing to watch on TV in 3D, Sony, Panasonic, JVC, DXG and Aiptek all will be selling 3D camcorders in 2011, with models ranging in price from $300 for the DXG-5F9V (May) to $2,000 for the JVC GS-TD1 (March).

…And TV — at Home…

Speaking of TV, our home boob tube is morphing into a more intelligent and sophisticated companion, although it may take another year or so for all the radical changes to seem normal.

We've had "connected" or "smart" TVs for more than a year, but they've been segregated — the Web widgets were one thing, TV was another. And according to NPD, even though sales of connected TVs are booming, less than half of them were actually connected.

Google attempted to desegregate the TV and Web environments with its Google TV platform last October. But Google has had to re-jigger its user interface, which was universally condemned by critics and users.

If Google can't get its interface act together quickly, they're leaving the door open to a certain company in Cupertino. Apple says it has sold a million of Steve Jobs' "hobby," Apple TV, and last September, the company has made a deal with electronic program guide supplier Rovi. Maybe, just maybe, Apple will introduce a true Apple TV, an LCD HDTV with a big widescreen, internet access to iTunes and apps, built-in Blu-ray player and DVR, and an interface any blue-haired grandma could suss.

Now that the Web is regularly sharing space with regular TV, we're going to need a bigger TV. With Web widget menus taking up a third of the available 16 x 9 HDTV screen real estate, two TV makers,Vizio and Philips, will start selling ultra widescreen 21 x 9 HDTVs. Cinemascope and Panavision 2.35:1 films can be viewed with no black bars above or below, and, more importantly, widget menus can take up a third of the vertical screen real estate leaving a full 16 x 9 area left for simultaneous TV watching.

…With Glasses…

Also shooting themselves in the foot are the 3D HDTV manufacturers. Less than a year ago, they introduce an "active" 3D technology requiring battery-powered glasses retailers can't seem to explain or demonstrate.

Then, at the just concluded CES, JVC, LG and Vizio all introduced "passive" 3D HDTVs that use the same simple 3D glasses you use in a movie theater. But even unpowered passive 3D means you're essentially wearing sunglasses indoors. And, according to Larry David, the only people who wear sunglasses indoors are blind people and assholes.

So a few folks like LG, Sony and Toshiba also showed off glasses-free 3D, like that's going to happen any time soon. It's not.

But 3D is here. 3D HDTVs happen to also make the best 2D HDTVs. There are a growing number of 3D Blu-ray movies available — and by the end of this year nearly all Blu-ray players will be 3D capable — including a 3D Avatar Blu-ray you can buy sans a Panasonic 3D HDTV (which, by the way, is the best HDTV of any kind available), and more and more networks will be broadcasting 3D, especially big sporting events.

In addition, we'll be seeing a lot more 3D games, especially now that Nvidia has unveiled 3DTV Play software and the 3D Vision kit, which not only turns more than 500 regular 2D PC games into 3D, but lets you play 2D PC games in 3D on any 3D HDTV when your HDTV is connected to one of the growing number of HDMI-connected Nvidia GeForce-equipped laptop PCs from Dell, HP, Toshiba and Asus. A list of convertible 2D games is available on Nvidia's Web site and the game packages themselves will be marked "3D Vision Ready."

Sony already is combining 3D on the PS3 with its new Move, which along with Microsoft's Kinect and the existing Nintendo Wii, is making gesture-control the most important gaming advance since the move from cartridges to CD. And both Texas Instruments and Vizio have shown a "dual view" 3D — wearing 3D glasses, each player will see a different view of the same game, handy when setting strategies on-screen.

So, yes, regardless of how ridiculous 3D HDTV seems now, 2011 will be the year 3D comes of age, stupid or not.

…And Away from Home

And finally, more than a year after adopting the standard, Mobile DTV may finally be coming to a laptop or iPad/iPhone/iPod near you via antenna dongles, MDTV-equipped cellphones, portable DVD players, and dedicated portable TVs.

This round-up represents only a fraction of the technological changes coming in 2011. I'll have more next week.