Whether the buzz about last year’s launches of the iPhone, Windows Vista, and third-party Facebook apps had more to do with mass-marketing campaigns than technological breakthroughs is debatable, but there will likely soon be plenty of mobile-related advances for even the most dyed-in-the-wool geek to get excited about.

Google plans for mainframe server farms with a simple internet connection free of charge may mean the masses could soon tap into apps previously reserved for government spy agencies and dark matter physicists. On a much smaller scale, manufacturers may be using nanowires to make handheld super computers within 10 years or so. And back in the present, Intel's plans for a quad-core laptop processor look set to complement terabyte-capacity 2.5in hard drives, making phenomenally capable portables a reality.

So will we soon hold the power of mainframe super computers in our pockets that will offer voice-activated beam-me-up Scotty commands to our mothership? We poked around to find out what to expect over the rest of 2008 -- and beyond.

Computing in the Clouds

Google and IBM say they will make high-powered parallel server applications available to the masses over the internet.

Google, IBM, and six universities around the world are collaborating on a project that could give average-Joe users access to applications over the Internet that harness the power of thousands of processors running in parallel.

While applications that pool together the resources of hundreds of computers have existed for decades, the application has traditionally been reserved for massively funded physics experiments, spy agency database projects and other expensive en extremis computing tasks.

Now, Google and IBM say Cloud Computing will soon give users access to super computing applications over the Internet from any ordinary PC with links to high-powered machines they have reserved for the masses at their mainframe server farms.

Universities participating in the project started using several hundred Google and IBM servers with well over 1,000 processors running in parallel towards the end of last year. IBM said it hopes it will offer Cloud Computing applications to customers in a few months. Google has not put a timeline on when you will be able to tap into its mainframes for free, but claims the day is just around the corner.

One potential application Google is touting involves the upload of perhaps millions of mobile phone images from around the globe, which the cluster Cloud computers would then process and render into 3D Google Earth images.

The Rise of the Android

Google says its Android operating system could transform mobile interfaces and applications, but it’s no iPhone – yet…

Google’s director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, stated that Google hopes its open source Android smartphone operating system “will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today.”

While Android devices have yet to be announced, prototypes are already on show and the first models are due to be launched before the end of the year.

But don’t expect handset manufacturers to start shipping Gphones that will compete directly against Apple’s iPhone anytime just yet. Google’s project is based on an open source initiative and the price points of Android phones are expected to fall in a less-expensive category than the Apple’s handset.

It may also take a long time for Android to take off and Google could likely face the same struggles that Microsoft did when it took the software giant years to get its Windows CE OS off the ground.

And as the world’s largest search engine company closely tracks your Web usage patterns, revealing even more personal data to sign up for an Android mobile package could be cause for concern for some. 

[Android]

Turning the Electronic Page

Electronic books are becoming something you actually want to read.

Electronics books used to be more about eye-straining fonts and clunky battery-eating components than something with which you would curl up next to the fireplace on a cold winter night. Now a new generation of ebook reading devices has become available with text quality that is comparable to that of printed paper.

Sony and Amazon so far represent the largest OEMs to adopt E Ink– technology that allows crisp, high-contrast displays that don’t need a battery-sucking backlight. Sony’s Portable Reader and Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers are still not available in Europe (the iRex Iliad is, however), but that could change by the end of this year.

Holland-based Polymervision announced earlier this month that its Readius mobile phone, which has a 5” flexible screen for ebooks, will see launch in the middle of the year.

E Ink’s next development? Improvements to the microcapsule technology that will do away with monochrome electronic print and bring colour and video to ebooks.

HD-DVD Will Not Die (Just Yet)

Warner Bros.’ recent announcement that it was dropping HD-DVD support probably sounded the death knell for the format, but don’t expect Blu-ray to win the battle this year hands down.

The timing could not have been worse for HD-DVD proponents: Warner Bros. announced it would no longer offer DVDs in the format just days before the Consumer Electronics Show. Given that seven major studios now support Blu-ray, it would seem as if HD-DVD’s days were numbered. Yet, HD-DVD, however, is far from dead. DreamWorks Animation, Paramount Pictures, and Universal Pictures will continue to release films on HD-DVD.

At least through 2008, there will still be plenty of HD-DVD laptops available. UK laptop manufacturer Rock, for example, offers HD-DVD drives as standard. Toshiba also remains the standard’s main proponent, and has no intention of yanking it after recently adding a rewritable HD-DVD drive to its Qosmio laptop range.