What’s this? Fog on the crystal ball?

My recent column (http://bit.ly/8EDlUL) with my take on upcoming digital trends had reader "pkay" saying I missed a few. He thinks I should have said that gadget manufacturers brought few memorable products to market in the last year. He also thinks I overlooked the expansion of solid-state hard drives and other power savers in laptops.

I had to chuckle at his suggestion that my piece could have been penned six months ago. It shows just how fast the wheels turn in technology.
 
I'm encouraged to see some manufacturers — Apple, for one — already offering solid-state drives. I expect others to do the same in the future. I also think the prices need to drop and the capacity of the drives need to grow to make these nonmechanical drives more commonplace. Size does matter to folks when it comes to hard drives these days, since everyone is becoming a multimedia producer.

I hope pkay is right that we’ll see more energy-efficient screens. This was part of the buzz at last year’s International Consumer Electronics Show and consumers did have some flat-screen energy-efficient light-emitting diode display televisions to choose from during the just-ended holiday shopping season. I'll keep my eyes open for more energy-efficient computer screens and will write about them here and in my CES columns in the weeks ahead.