Fundamentos De Ingenieria

smartphones social networking voice over ip led lighting multicore CPUs cloud computing drone aircraft planetary rovers flexible ac transmission digital photography class-d audio

top

11

technologies

of

the

decade

The most powerful technologies take a while to mature. But when they do, they can rapidly retire mainstays that are decades old

L i f e w a s d i f f e r e n t ad e c a d e a g o . Your phone couldn’t contain your entire music collection, for example, or guide you to a restaurant in a foreign city. Bomber-reconnaissance planes invariably had pilots on board. And how’s this for quaint: Your corner drugstore still stocked photographic film! The technolo waves that washed away those realities spread from tremors that occurred years before: The first smartphonewas unveiled by IBM in 1993, the first digital photo was taken in 1975, and the first drone aircraft flew during World War II. Clearly, the seeds of the next crop of technolo staples have already been planted. Perhaps the first tender shoots can already be discerned among the pages of this issue. —Philip E. Ross

SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

JANUARY 2011 • IEEE SPECTRUM • NA

27

top 11 technologiesof the

decade

Smartphones
no. 1
IS YOUR PHONE SMARTER THAN A FIFTH GRADER?
Yes
douglas adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is named after a pocketable device that contains everything worth knowing. But that seems almost quaint today, when you can carry the full contents of the Web in your pocket, as well as a telephone, a camera, a radio, a television, and a navigationsystem. Today’s smartphones are marvels of engineering, crammed with more features than the average PC. They’ve become the prime driver of innovation for both software and hardware. It took half a century to shrink the mainframe from the size of a living room to that of a suitcase. It took another decade to make it smaller than a wallet. The smartphone has swallowed and assimilated functionality frommusic players, remote controls, gaming consoles, even printed maps and news publications. And now that smartphones are serving as Wi-Fi hot spots, they can replace wireless routers and modems, too. Smartphones are becoming as essential as keys or a wallet, and they’ll soon
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replace those as well [see “Company to Watch”]. This has some real 60 consequences. Unlike its predecessors, thesmartphone is an inherently personal device: Not only is it always on, it’s 50 always somewhere on us. Without realizing it, we’ve let smartphones usher us into an age of ubiquitous, 40 pervasive computing that technologists, as well as science-fiction authors, have been 30 dreaming about for years. “Smartphones help users stay connected to information at any given time, any given location,” 20 saysDilip Krishnaswamy, a Qualcomm engineer and associate editor in chief of IEEE Wireless Communications. “The 10 information is just there when you need it.” We’ve come to rely on such connectivity. There’s 0 no need to pack a map or directions when an app can guide you in real time, nor to consult a restaurant guide before leaving the house. In these and a thousand other ways, the smartphone, more thanany other technology to have emerged in the past decade, is the one that has most changed our lives. To be sure, back in 1973, Motorola’s Martin Cooper didn’t set out to build an always-connected, portable computing device. He was simply trying to shrink

NOT ALL SMART YET:

Projected smartphone penetration
PERCENTAGE OF ALL MOBILE PHONES
50%

North America 40% Western Europe 30%

20%A si

aP

ac i fi

c

Ce n

tr a

l&

te Ea s

rn E

uro

pe

10%

Middle

Ea s t &

Africa

Latin America 2010 2014

Smartphones are proliferating rapidly, but they still make up a minority of all mobile phones. Customers in North America have been especially quick to embrace them, but Italy still has the highest concentration in the world. The low percentage in...