In the earlier times, I mean way earlier, it is magical to see yourself in paper. To take a photograph, you need to pose for whole 8 hours in front of a box as bulky as your grandmother’s cabinet. And the photograph will fade soon after, waving goodbye to 8 hours of smiling. That is their breakthrough technology; and now we just hope all the photos people post online will fade all at once and never appear again.

Today, June 2012, we see what’s coming in the future’s technological facet. Thanks to the hints of the industry and company players, we have the glimpse of what’s coming ahead. This is just to remind us that what we could have today will be childish compared to what they’ll release in the future.

Cars gone auto and gasless

Automatic cars are rampant in our roads, but automatic is not the apt name for it. I call this new one automatic automatic car because it’s beyond our definition of automatic car. Google named it Google’s self-driving car. It’s a car that drives on its own, computer programmed that knows traffic rules and human behaviors. Okay, goodluck with human behaviors but someday, dads won’t need to drive their son to soccer game because their car is on self-drive.

A month ago, Nevada became the first state that approved operation of Google’s self-driving car. They have a red license plate and a Greek infinity symbol so people know and won’t freak out upon seeing that no one’s driving it.

There are a few gasless cars available for purchase now; but as long as gas isn’t depleted, we won’t see it taking over. However, when car makers produce more gasless cars than the usual gas-dependent, people would turn to it. It’s cheaper and it’s environmental friendly. Electric cars are on the move, oxygen powered are in development and even cars turn invisible with hydrogen fuel.

Cloud services for all

Yesterday, I got myself a Nokia Lumia 900. Unlike the iPhone and the rest of smartphones, it only comes in 16GB. It made the price cheaper and constant, but it doesn’t mean the memory is compromised. It is embedded with Microsoft’s SkyDrive where I store my music, videos, photos and documents in my online hard drive. The phone will simultaneously sync to it whenever I need to access my files, say I want to listen to Dave Matthews Band. In turn, my phone’s memory is wide as the sky.

Apple also has its cloud services, called iCloud that syncs all your files to your iOS devices. Add to that, there are emerging cloud storage services like Dropbox and JustCloud. External and internal hard drives will be needless in the future; and this cloud service will also travel to gaming consoles including Xbox Live.

Kicking and screaming Windows

Windows Phone came out and it’s rocking. The software is creative and beautiful. If you have common sense, you won’t need any support for it because it’s user friendly. Android is still number one, followed by iOS; but according to market analysts at IDC, the new player Windows Phone will overtake Apple’s iOS market share by 2016, Google’s Android will remain the top spot but will drop to 52.9 % share.

Microsoft also announced Surface. When iPad and the resembling tablets teared our eyes for the futuristic device, we soon realized that it doesn’t do much. It is cool and portable but it cannot replace the functionality of a Laptop. Now with the upcoming Microsoft Surface, tablet and laptop are fused as one – and the crossover looks promising.