Saturday, December 17, 2016

TOP 5 PC technologies and trends to watch in 2017

     A computer with an Intel SSD on display at Computex                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
Prices of SSDs are going up due to shortages, and that could have an impact on the price of laptops, 2-in-1 computers and storage. Dell’s XPS 13 with Intel’s Kaby Lake chips and a 512GB SSD, for example, is not available right now.  Other laptops with 512GB SSDs are priced unbelievably high. Most PC makers are offering 128GB or 256GB SSDs in PCs by default. Choose storage wisely, as it isn’t easy to screw open a superthin 2-in-1 to replace an SSD.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Talk to your PC                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       The feud between Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana voice-activated assistants could get more interesting next year. Users will be able to shout out Cortana commands to Windows 10 PCs from a longer distance, thanks to a “far-field speech recognition”
technology that Intel and Microsoft are working on. Until now, Cortana worked best if a user was close to a PC, but millions of Windows PCs will turn into Amazon Echo competitors with this new feature. Cortana can do a lot more than Amazon Echo, like accessing information from the cloud, chatting with chatbots, checking email and other tasks.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               (AMD ratchets up chip battle with Intel)                                                                                                               
  Intel has been the unchallenged king of PCs for more than a decade, but AMD is fighting back with its new Ryzen PC processor, which will reaches PCs next year. A healthy rivalry will be good news for PC users, some of whom may jump from the Intel to the AMD camp. AMD
claims Ryzen is 40 percent faster than its current PC chips, which on paper is impressive. The chips will first hit gaming PCs, and then mainstream laptops and desktops later in 2017. Ryzen will battle Intel’s Kaby Lake in early 2017, and the 10-nanometer Cannonlake in late 2017.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    (Bluetooth 5 will take charge)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Laptops and 2-in-1s will be equipped with the latest Bluetooth 5 wireless specification, which is a longer and faster upgrade to the aging Bluetooth 4.2. Bluetooth 5 will allow PCs to communicate wirelessly with devices up to 400 meters away in
clear line of sight, but a more reasonable range is about 120 meters, according to analysts.  Bluetooth 5 will transfer data at speeds of up to 2Mbps, which is two times faster than its predecessor.      
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  (More changes for keyboards)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        We saw some interesting changes to keyboards this year: Apple added the Touch Bar, while Lenovo swapped out the hard keyboard for a virtual keyboard on a touch input panel for its Yoga Book. Lenovo wants to bring the virtual keyboard to more Chromebooks and 2-in-1s, partly because of its versatility.
The touch input panel can also be used to draw or take notes with a stylus. It’s a toss-up: Lenovo believes that those used to typing on mobile devices will adapt to this touch panel keyboard quickly, while hard keyboard diehards will dismiss the idea.                              
 source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/3150700/computers/top-10-pc-technologies-and-trends-to-watch-in-2017.html

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