Coming in 2012

3D goes away and net-connected TVs become standard

It was the big new tech must-have of 2011 - making everyone want to buy brand-new TVs and don a silly pair of specs every time they wanted to play a game or watch a film. Except that it wasn't. Few people cared, we were in the middle of a recession and a good proportion of people couldn't see the 3D effect anyway.

We predict that hardware makers and game developers will become much quieter about the whole 3D thing in 2012, with very little being said about it by the end of the year.

This isn't to say that stereoscopic 3D will be dead. It still makes sense to show 3D films at the cinema, where people can go for a one-off 3D effects thrill, but we reckon that the cost of buying a new TV, the need to wear glasses, problems with eye strain and nausea, not to mention the lack of native content, will push 3DTVs and gaming out of the picture by the end of the year.

Instead, we predict that net-connected TVs will become the new standard, offering easy access to services such as BBC iPlayer, 4oD and LoveFilm streaming.

The iPad gets a proper challenger

There have been a lot of challengers to Apple's iPad range in the tablet market, some of which are based on Google's Android OS, but so far they haven't made much of a dent in Apple's stronghold. This could be set to change in 2012, though, thanks to the UK release of Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. The new device is widely tipped to be scheduled for a UK release at the beginning of 2012, offering all the basics for less than half the price of an iPad 2.

In the USA, the Kindle Fire costs just $199, and features a 7in IPS screen, 8GB of solid-state storage and a dual-core CPU.

More importantly, however, it has access to Amazon's huge content catalogue, as well as an Amazon AppStore and an accelerated browser that uses cloud-based servers to take the load of rendering complex webpages away from the device. Not only that, but you can also store any content bought from Amazon in the cloud.

In the USA, the Fire is now officially the number two tablet in terms of sales, and while it hasn't overtaken the iPad, it appears to have put the other competitors to shame.

Let's just hope that Amazon prices it sensibly in the UK - adding VAT to the price at the current exchange rate would put it at just £155, which would be awesome for such a well-equipped piece of kit.