Debate y Conocimiento

Considering it was a year of crisis, 2009 turned out to be more fertile in the field of technological innovations than we might have expected. Perhaps because those who were least affected by the crisis took advantage of their competitors’ weaknesses to try and set themselves apart. Intel, Google and Apple have continued to work on new products which we might see at the start of next year (Apple’s tablet or Google’s mobile operating system). It may also have helped that, in the technology segment, the year has not been as bad as expected.

In some cases, innovation has been the result of competition. The shake-up in the market caused in 2007 by the launch of the Apple iPhone has meant a definitive change in what a smartphone is expected to offer. In 2009 we have witnessed the launch of what is probably the most elegant alternative, to date, to the iPhone operating system: Palm’s webOS. We have also seen the consolidation of Android as the favourite alternative of manufacturers aspiring to compete with Apple but who do not want to, or cannot develop a software platform of their own (in other words, who are neither Nokia, RIM or Palm). It seems obvious that the size of Palm and the fact that it was launched with the weakest operator in the US market, Sprint, have reduced its chances of success. But it is likely that if webOS had been produced by Google instead of Palm, the current competitive scenario might be very different.

This does not alter the fact that Android is starting to be competitive: the Droid, the handset developed by Motorola and commercialised by Verizon Wireless [1] , has been chosen as the best electronic device of the year by the magazine Time, ahead of the iPhone 3GS (and of my personal favourite, Dyson’s blade-free fan, see http://www.dyson.com/fans/ ). The strange thing is that, although Droid was designed as a ‘social’ device, the application which appears to be most attractive to users is the free voice navigation system Google Maps. This is bad news for Garmin, Tom Tom and other companies in the sat nav sector. And on the same subject, Google’s mapping data in the United Status are of its own creation. And that is bad news for NavTech and TeleAtlas.

It also looks as though competition is underway in the category of electronic book readers, now that it looks like they are beginning to gain traction in the market. This year brought us new models from Barnes & Noble, Sony, enTourage, iRex and Plastic Logic, as well as an update of Amazon’s Kindle. This is also the first type of mass diffusion device (by that we mean Kindle, fundamentally) in which the network is invisible. This is a trend in which, together with M2M communications and sensor networks, we will see explosive growth in the coming years.

Of course, this year has also seen some spectacular flops. It could not be said, for example, that this has been a good year for Microsoft in terms of its mobile strategy. It is true that Windows 7 has been well received, with sales exceeding those seen by Vista in its day and infinitely better reviews. But in the area of mobile communications, things are going from bad to worse. While we await Windows Mobile 7, which looks unlikely to arrive until the second half of 2010, the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 was greeted with reviews which were at best acidic, and at worst, highly indifferent. The loss of data by Sidekick, although it could not be blamed on Microsoft technology, was another embarrassing episode, which may have more profound consequences: along with similar situations at the hands of Nokia and Palm, it may lead to user distrust of the service offering storage of data in the ‘cloud’. At least its prototype tablet Courier has been able to generate a certain degree of (justified) expectation.

For its part, Nokia is going through what might be called a state of confusion: it continues to dominate the statistics in sales of mobiles but it cannot break free from a certain feeling of vulnerability. Its products are solid but not exciting. It seems that some of the company’s directors continue to believe that its future lies in becoming a services company and that with Ovi they can compete with Google, although there are no figures in its accounts which back this thesis. The principal new feature from the Finnish multinational was the launch onto the market of its first netbook with integrated 3G communications, although the intention is far from clear (this is a segment in which competition is brutal and the margins very slim). And it is still too soon to assess its attempts to make Symbian an open source alternative which can compete with Android, but the doubts which appear to exist within the company itself, with information (denied) which indicates that it might migrate to its software platform based on Linux Maemo, are not helping at all.

In 2009 we have also witnessed the first episodes in what might be the war of processors for advanced mobiles, between Intel's x86 architecture and that of ARM, which is used by companies like Qualcomm, Freescale and Samsung amongst others. At the moment they are just skirmishes, in expectation of the first launches of ‘smartbooks’, the new category of devices invented by Qualcomm. The end of the year did, however, provide a surprise: Intel's decision to terminate the line of development of the graphics processing unit (GPU) Larrabee. Some people believe that this decision makes the purchase of Nvidia by Intel inevitable. Because everything points, at least in the minds of the analysts, to the fact that one of the next devices having the most drive in the market will be the netbook with the ability to reproduce HD video, supported by the combination of an Atom-type low capacity processor and an Nvidia Ion-type graphics card (and mobile broadband connectivity).

And in terms of pure curiosity, it is worth pointing out how some players, inevitably in these times of crisis, have given new uses to an already existing technology. This is the case of the flood prevention system which has been developed at the University of Tel Aviv, based on measurements of the fluctuations in electromagnetic waves caused by humidity in wireless communication systems (the article in which this is explained is available at http://bit.ly/8v17Pl ). Or – more esoteric but theoretically less useful – the system for seeing through walls using ZigBee devices which has been developed at the MIT. The article explaining this (for those who can understand it) is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.5417 .

References

[1] Droid is not Motorola’s first Android mobile: this honour goes to the DEXT.

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