All of this can happen far quicker than the supposedly-instant online world can react.What about social media? Shouldn’t I also turn to Twitter to look out for dangers in my vicinity?I know who to look for – people who live in the right place to see the smoke or the flames.I don’t follow the Rural Fire Service Tweets because they’re most often links to the incident page that I already watch.The rest of Twitter is as much use as two hundred kilometers away: people Tweeting their well-wishes are nice, but not informative; people re-Tweeting obsolete warnings from four hours ago merely noise, as are those who clog the feed with links to news stories.The CSIRO has told the Australian Financial Review that 12.5 million tweets relating to the bushfires have been sent this week. That's great for someone able to cope with the "big data" analysis, but it renders the medium useless to the individual.
Mainstream news publishers are especially guilty of feed-clogging. If I wanted to rely on Twitter as my bushfire information source, I’d have to find some way of muting media feeds that are either image-feeds (they don’t actually say “Send us your pics of the catastrophic fires now engulfing your community!”, but they may as well) or news stories that are running half-an hour behind ground truth.All of which means my most important technical aid on an extreme fire danger day is also the oldest one to hand: an AM radio tuned to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s local service, present both in the house and in the car, and able to break into its programming in real time when there’s an emergency.It was claimed by one market watcher this week that tablets will outsell notebook computers during 2013. By 2016, says another, slates’ share of the PC market will have surpassed all other devices combined.
The research firm in question is Canalys, and it reckons Wintel’s share of the PC market will drop from 72 per cent in 2012 to 65 per cent this year on the back of a five per cent fall in unit shipments. The trend has been established, and come 2016, desktops, notebooks and what few netbooks remain will together account for just 41 per cent of the PC market.The remaining 59 per cent - some 389 million units in all, Canalys estimates - will be tablets.Canalys sees this as a sign that many buyers, consumers in particular, have come to realise that tablets and phones are sufficient for their computing needs. If all you’re doing is checking email, posting Facetweets and buying stuff from Amazon, you don’t need an old-style PC, surely?Not necessarily. Makers of Wintel kit and their two key component suppliers are realists and have already seen the way the market is going. Windows 8 is a tablet operating system with an older desktop OS built in for backwards compatibility. Its unfamiliar primary user interface may dissuade some laptop and desktop buyers from investing in a new machine, at least for the time being, but it shouldn’t put off folk who specifically want a tablet and don’t fancy an iPad or an Android device.
While it’s fair to say, as Canalys does, that Windows 8 has failed to reinvigorate the desktop and notebook markets, that shouldn’t be seen as a sign that the Wintel PC is in trouble. The old/i> Wintel PC is having a tough time, but a new Wintel PC is emerging, and definitions of market segments may need to change accordingly.Microsoft’s own Surface machines - the ARM-based RT and the Intel-based Pro - show the way. Canalys records these devices, even the latter, as tablets not Wintel PCs. They are not alone - other vendors are producing or preparing Wintel tablets with attachable or slide-away keyboards. At what point then do you record these so-called ‘hybrids’ as tablets, because that's their form-factor, and not as Wintel PCs, even though they are personal computers running Windows on Intel processors?What it’s really saying, then, is that desktops and classic clamshell form-factor portables are falling out of favour and will plunge to less than half of the market in four years.
It’s too early to say whether Windows 8 will be a major tablet player, or whether its inability thus far to lift the notebook and desktop markets is a sign of its own failings - would-be buyers don’t like it - or simply that Microsoft’s new OS isn’t strong enough a draw to counter the ongoing decline in computer sales caused by the state of the world economy - would-be buyers can’t afford it.Unfortunately, unless the Wintel PC’s evolution into a very thin, handheld touchscreen device is matched by a downward shift in pricing to compete not with Apple laptops but Apple tablets, its shift tablet-ward may not save it. The Tegra 4 was codenamed ‘Wayne’, not after Harry Enfield’s slobby character but for the billionaire behind the bat mask. The new chip will, however, make its predecessor seem something of a lardy layabout. Based on ARM’s quad-core A15 architecture, the Tegra 4 delivers a modest CPU performance increases over its rivals and predecessors. But with a 72-core custom GPU on board, Nvidia claims it will deliver considerably smoother, better graphics, good not just for phone and tablet gaming but for working with all the photos these gadgets are increasingly being used to take.
Yet the lithe Tegra 4 consumes 45 per cent less energy than the Tegra 3 does, Nvidia claims. Like its predecessor, the Tegra 4 has a fifth, “battery save core” on board to run routine tasks when the A15’s cores aren’t needed. These burst into life on demand and are then throttled right back to saver power. Have your cake and eat it too? It looks like you’ll be able to with the new Tegra.Samsung has been showing off foldable, bendy OLED panels at CES for the past four or five years, but now it's actually preparing to commercialise them. "We're so confident about the market potential for flexible OLEDs we're creating an entire new line of them," said a company executive this week. It's even going so far as to give them a brandname of their own: Youm. Well, they've got to call them something. Maybe it makes sense in Korean...Samsung staff showed off a device with a slide-out flexible screen and a phone-like gadget with a display that wraps over one edge and down the side to form an at-a-glance notification readout. Of course, it's easy for a company of Samsung's resources to churn out working concept devices and new form-factors like these - the real test is turning them into real products and putting them on sale at prices consumers will accept.
Qualcomm's AR9004TB doesn’t look much - it’s just a mini PCI wireless adaptor - but it’s the acme of wireless connectivity. The Atheros chip comes from Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi subsidiary and delivers 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11ac, the gigabit-capable beamforming-based successor to 802.11n. The Wilocity silicon next to it adds support for the just-published 802.11ad standard, allowing the card to route network traffic at up to 7Gb/s in the 60GHz band. That means you’ll eventually be able to do really fast wireless downloads from your Nas when you’re close to your router, but still work wirelessly when you move to another room, into which the 60GHz signals won’t penetrate.Since the Wilocity supports the built-on-802.11ad WiGig standard, it also paves the way for wireless USB, HDMI, DisplayPort and PCI, so you’ll be able to rid yourself of peripheral wires too if you wish.
Of course, all this requires 802.11ac and 802.11ad at the router - and in keyboards, monitors etc. for the cord cutting component - and it remains to be seen how transparently the card hardware and drivers handle switching over from ad to ac as the 60GHz signal tails off. Still it’s early days yet - the truly wireless future beckons and this is the first step toward it.Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite was a rather chunky hard drive, bulked out because it contained a wireless unit, a server module and a battery to keep the whole lot running. This week, Seagate took the wraps off a second-generation model, this one with a terabyte of (raw) storage capacity and a slimmer, tougher casing. As before, it’s a USB 3.0 device and continues to use Seagate’s GoFlex tech so the port is removable and can be replaced with Firewire or Thunderbolt. Fill up your drive then leave the cable and adaptor behind to save space in your pack.Loaded up, the Wireless Plus is ready to share its content with up to eight phones, tablets and computers over Wi-Fi. It has DLNA and Apple AirPlay streaming tech on board, or you can download files for local playback and to conserve the drive’s battery life - which runs to ten hours, Seagate claims. The $200 (£125) gadget is available in the States now; UK availability is TBC.
It’s not the first waterproof Android smartphone, but Sony’s latest handset impresses with its spec - quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, 4G LTE connectivity, 2GB Ram, Micro SD storage, NFC, HDMI via MHL, 7.9mmm thickness and 13Mp camera with high dynamic range video shooting, a “world’s first” - and a rather gorgeous 5in, 1080 x 1920, 440ppi display. It will run Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.If you’re worried - not unreasonably - that the 4G support means the Z’s battery life will suck, Sony insisted you shouldn't be concerned: the phone has a Stamina mode that cleverly freezes battery-sapping apps when the screen is turned off and automatically revives them when the backlight comes back on. This trick, the company claimed, “improves your standby time by at least four times”. Sony quotes a standby life of between 510 and 550 hours, depending on the kind of cellular network the phone’s attached to.