Coming in 2012

Cloud storage becomes standard

As with OnLive, all that's really holding back the potential of cloud storage in the UK at the moment is our shaky broadband infrastructure, but we can see cloud storage really taking off for consumers in 2012. There are several reasons for this, not least the silly price of local hard drives at the moment.

However, with Amazon's Kindle Fire launching in 2012, and Google's Music service also potentially seeing a UK release this year, we can also see many people choosing to opt for cloud storage in favour of local storage on mobile devices.

After all, why persevere with your smartphone's limited memory when you could theoretically access your entire music collection via the cloud? Similarly, there's huge potential for cloud storage for backup, as well as large-scale file-sharing, and we don't mean copyright infringement.

Why email huge files back and forth when you could just share large documents using DropBox? There's some really exciting potential here, making access to large-scale storage potentially cheaper and more convenient for online sharing.

Ultrabooks fail to take off

We're taking a risk with this one, but we reckon that Intel might have trouble pushing its Ultrabook concept in 2012 for a number of reasons. The first is that we're currently in tough financial times, which makes the appeal of an expensive laptop limited, particularly when you can buy half-decent laptops for under £400 that will have all the performance that most people need.


The second is Apple's MacBook line-up. Whichever your preference in terms of operating system, there's no denying that Apple puts a huge amount of work into making well-designed, well-built laptops that offer a lot of performance. You also pay a premium for this, which is expected when you buy an Apple product. The problem for Ultrabooks, however, is that the models we've seen so far are only slightly cheaper than Apple's MacBook Air models, and don't offer a great deal more in terms of processor speed and general specs.

This isn't to say that they aren't decent machines, but if you're spending close to a grand on a laptop - and not a specific high-performance laptop for gaming or workstation work - we reckon that the average punter is more likely to spend their money on a MacBook than an Ultrabook. There are currently rumours that Intel is subsidising OEMs in Taiwan to enable them to drop the price, which could help Ultrabook sales in the long run, but we reckon it's still going to be a struggle. Also, Ultrabook is a silly name.