A good year for Apple

Last year we heard about Apple all set to come up with tracking pucks that are similar to Tile. Reportedly to be called Apple Tags or Air Tags, it could be a big winner for the company. It is likely to take advantage of Apple’s new U1 locator chip, which uses ultra-wideband that can tell iPhone owners if they venture too far from a tagged object.

And wouldn’t it be great if Apple pushes a subscription bundle which would encompass things like Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, iCloud Storage and much more for a small price? And why not throw in the iPhone itself in the subscription service? Last year when analyst Toni Sacconaghi asked if there was a possibility that the company might bundle hardware into a subscription in the future, Tim Cook, instead of shooting down the idea, said something like it was already in effect. “In terms of hardware as a service or as a bundle, if you will, there are customers today that essentially view the hardware like that because they’re on upgrade plans and so forth. So to some degree that exists today. My perspective is that will grow in the future to larger numbers. It will grow disproportionately,” Cook has said.

Hiding smartphones

The way we use smartphones will see a shift. More and more people will harness the power of wireless earphones and smartwatches. The smartphone will hide in one’s pocket while one reads time, messages and other details on their smartwatch while music and calls can be managed through wireless buds. You will be looking at the screen fewer times each day.

A lot relies on one game

We have been hearing a lot about virtual reality making it big but who wants to wear a heavy headset? Since the launch of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive a few years ago, there have been a lot of progress on the VR front but we are still looking for a killer app. It didn’t help (the cause of VR) that Pokemon Go gave AR a big boost. Well, VR will get its second life thanks to the game Half-Life: Alyx. Online buzz says the game will be available only in VR, promising sunny days for the technology. Fingers crossed.

More 5G blah-blah

If 2019 was about the race to presenting the early lot of 5G-enabled smartphones, 2020 will find the efforts ramp up. Expect to see original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), infrastructure, spectrum and edge devices to make a lot of good noise. But it seems that — given the situation in the country’s telecom industry — India will have to wait till 2021 to actually take advantage of 5G. The technology is not just about making downloads easy; it’s about making devices interact with one another and people need to understand how that happens. This means, look forward to more IoT-enabled products from the likes of Xiaomi and wait for 5G.

Console war

Video game enthusiasts are expected to have a rollicking year with Sony and Microsoft set to launch their next consoles. While Sony will deliver PlayStation 5, Microsoft will present Xbox Series X and both will have enough to keep loyalists happy.

The current PS5 controller’s rumble feature will be replaced with contextual haptic feedback. “With haptics, you truly feel a broader range of feedback, so crashing into a wall in a race car feels much different than making a tackle on the football field. You can even get a sense for a variety of textures when running through fields of grass or plodding through mud,” Sony has said in a statement.

The other innovation is “adaptive triggers” (L2 and R2 buttons), with which developers can programme the resistance of the triggers, allowing, for example, a different sensation while drawing a bow and arrow than shooting guns. Then comes the SSD (solid-state drive) aspect, which will help the console read information way quicker than from a hard drive. Every millisecond that’s saved adds up to make a massive difference. It will also encourage developers to come up with detailed game worlds.

Sony has also revealed that its device will feature an eight-core CPU based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen processors, as well as a custom graphics processor based on the AMD Navi family, besides supporting 8K resolution and 120Hz screen refresh rates.

Microsoft, too, will go that extra mile with its device — Xbox Series X, which the company claims will set a new bar for performance and speed: “Its industrial design enables us to deliver four times the processing power of Xbox One X in the most quiet and efficient way, something that is critically important in delivering truly immersive gameplay,” Xbox chief Phil Spencer has said in a blog post.

In way of specifications, it will include a custom AMD Zen 2 processor, with the possibility of 120fps rates and supporting 8K displays. The machine will also feature a solid-state drive. And importantly, the Xbox Series X will offer backwards compatibility with Xbox One and previous Xbox machines.

“We wanted to make sure we had that, day one, we could deliver on the compatibility promise, and so I’ve been playing quite a few [Xbox 360] games on my [Xbox Series X] and Xbox One games on the [Xbox Series X] and that’s just to ensure that we can be there day one,” Spencer has told GameSpot.

We are looking forward to play Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II on the new Xbox and Godfall on PS5.

Deepfakes

Manipulating videos is nothing new; director Robert Zemeckis’s team digitally inserted Tom Hanks in a scene featuring John F. Kennedy in Forrest Gump in 1994. But deepfake is something far more potent and it may change the game for worse to the point of it being used maliciously for political ends. We have been creating fake audio and video for a long time but the general area of deepfake involves AI-synthesised fakes that are created using neural networks. Instead of somebody manually working on every frame, we can train the computer to handle the process. Superimposing faces has reached a new level of refinement. Last year we saw a free face-swapping app called Zao going viral in China. It allowed users to replace the face of the star in a TV show or film in a 30-second clip. The problem around deepfakes will intensify.

More talk about privacy

Instead of likes on social media, many will talk about how they are taking privacy seriously. This will come in the way of the gadgets we buy and the smartwatch we wear. Privacy will have a strong appeal.

108MP buzz

Xiaomi’s CC9 Pro arrived in China in December 2019 with a 108MP sensor, which is the same as Samsung ISOCELL Bright HMX that has been designed with Xiaomi. We should be getting it in the form of Xiaomi Mi Note 10. Realme has confirmed that the company is also working on a 108MP camera and, of course, we hope to find the same on the Samsung Galaxy S11 phones.

Now a higher resolution means the need for more processing power and requirement for more storage space. And it’s not just about pixels; there is the issue of colour accuracy and dynamic range. Companies need to address these concerns to popularise 108MP cameras.

Television upgrades

As the smartphone market slows down and profit margins are getting squeezed, companies will put more emphasis on smart television. India being a sizeable upgrade market, more and more companies will enter the TV segment to offer smart options at down-to-earth pricing. Some top brands — like Samsung, LG and Sony — will innovate in way of technology at a time when most smart TVs are nothing more than just bigger smartphones, except for the ability to accept inputs from the antenna.

Also, the growth needs to be seen in tandem with the continuing rise of OTT players. Global players Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are going to offer top quality shows but it will be the likes of Hotstar, ZEE5 and Sony LIV besides language players, like Hoichoi, which will have maximum sway. In 2020 more and more people may stop paying DTH players because there is enough OTT content out there to keep them happy and all they need to use is the power of something like Fire TV Stick.