Tech Products We Should Have Had By Now

Is it November already? It's hard to tell with the World Series dragging on, but as far as PC tech is concerned, let's face it: For all practical purposes (i.e., now that vendors' lineups for the holiday sales season are out), 2009 is ending. Unfortunately, a bunch of things we were promised earlier in the year haven't materialized. Step back a few months and you can make a list of cool technologies that made headlines -- and that were supposed to have made their debuts by now. I for one got my hopes up for several, including the following:

More to do with touch. I'm hoping Windows 7 brings a boom in touch-interface applications, led by touch-screen hardware like HP's third-generation TouchSmart desktops and Lenovo's ThinkPad T400s with multi-touch. I want more gestures; I'm bored with the touchpad repertoire of pinching two fingers to zoom, spreading them to expand, and pivoting them to rotate an image. The next time a vendor proudly shows me those same three tricks, I may make quite another gesture.

3D. 3D movies have become ubiquitous in theaters, but desktop 3D remains thin. Last January, Nvidia unveiled 3D Vision, a 3D gaming and movie-viewing kit for GeForce 8800GT, 9600GT, and 200 Series and higher GPUs and 120Hz LCD monitors and Mitsubishi DLP HDTVs. Today, a few hot new titles such as Resident Evil 5 and Batman: Arkham Asylum plus a pretty good selection of DirectX games support the $199 kit, but it hasn't been a blockbuster. Even as HDTV sets increasingly boast 120Hz or 240Hz technology, the list of 3D Vision hardware includes the same two Samsung and ViewSonic monitors it did to begin with. 3D monitor maker iZ3D is still more of a blip on the radar than a famous brand. Nvidia's archrival AMD hasn't felt the need to offer 3Dware.

But 3D fans not only look at life through rose-colored glasses, but through rose- and blue-colored ones. Last month brought us both Win 7, whose DirectX 11 API has a few more programming tweaks for 3D, and the Acer Aspire 5738DG -- a $780 notebook with a 15.6-inch TriDef screen that works with supplied polarizer glasses to turn images, movies, and games to 3D. Still, it's safe to say that PC 3D hasn't caught on nearly as much as some pundits predicted.

This may change, not so much because the Acer will spur imitators as because January's Consumer Electronics Show is likely to be dominated by 3D TV. However, CES is also likely to be dominated by talk of the recession -- the Las Vegas Hilton next to the convention center still has rooms available, which is almost unprecedented -- and 3D on the PC may continue to be perceived as an overpriced, under-delivering frill.

But it's not only expensive luxury technologies that are missing in action. There's ...

Cheap little netbooks. Those of us with fond memories of the Psion Series 5 and HP Jornada 720 had our hopes raised at June's Computex, where half of Taiwan seemed to be buzzing about smaller, less expensive alternatives to today's already compact $300 to $400 netbook PCs -- mini machines with ARM or Nvidia Tegra instead of Intel's Atom processors, built around Linux or Moblin or Android instead of Windows XP, promising eight or ten instead of four or five hours of battery life, and destined to sell for $200 or less or even to come free with a contract from a wireless data carrier when they arrived at year's end.

Well? Verizon and AT&T offer conventional netbooks for $150 with two-year data contracts and Radio Shack has free-with-contract USB modems, but the biggest mobile-broadband news items since June have been (a.) Nokia's announcement of a 3G- and GPS-equipped netbook rumored to cost a staggering $800 and (b.) AT&T's cute commercials with Bill Kurtis enjoying his always-connected netbook wherever he roams. Again, CES might see some new developments, but for now subnetbooks seem to have joined MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) on the vapor list, right alongside ...

The Apple tablet. This one has been rumored for so long and in such detail that it's surprising it hasn't revolutionized mobile video-watching, Web-surfing, and book-reading already. But the iTablet's -- it's not going to be called that; I'm one of those betting Apple will bring back the old name iBook -- slide from Q4 to Q1 is less important than its reported rise from $600 to $800. With today's $400 laptops and with Barnes & Noble's Nook and Amazon.com's Kindle starting an eBook war at $259, Apple may be trying to bring consumer spending out of the recession singlehandedly.

WiMAX. Oops, sorry. That was left over from a 2005 draft of this editorial.