I’m not sure if our personal devices have to get smaller, but that is the current trend. A full qwerty keyboard is already a trade off. Either the keys are too small to be usable or the device is larger than it would be otherwise. Once we get down to just a number pad, even the 10-12 keys start to limit how small a device can be and take up valuable space on the device that could be used for displaying media or other input. Look at the iphone. They had to go to a touch screen just to get a decent amount of space. Of course the touch screen is pretty sexy, but don’t let it distract you from the fact that we are running out of space as devices shrink. This article, gives a few examples of voice into user input. My Motorola phone does voice recognition without any sort of training. Granted, this is a limited domain, so it doesn’t have as many choices to process, but it’s easily conceivable to me that increased processing power will keep enlarging the envelope until we can dictate to our computers without training them. Jott seems to do close to this already. It’s kind of hard to believe how powerful and flexible Jott is until you try it, but I would still rather have that power contained in a device I have control of. How long until my cell phone or mp3 player can do that on its own? Of course, I said voice recognition was the penultimate method, meaning there is still some room for growth. However, it does appear that progress is being made on the ultimate user input method. I can definitely see this opening up new possibilities.

Just when I open my mouth, someone tries to prove me wrong. Belkin is rapidly closing on a $99 price point for a wireless USB hub, thought it looks like you need to provide your own WiFi access point. Other units I have seen include a dongle that fills this gap. Consumer electronics companies are finally catching on as well. I always assumed have a single standard would save them money in the long run, and the companies in this article seem to be agreeing with that, at least indirectly through member organizations. I never considered the environmental impact before, because I assumed corporations wouldn’t care unless they were forced to by regulation, but I can see newer “green” influences affecting this as well.

Even though USB isn’t good enough for some people, and even though the top Google links have outdated information, the balance is tipping. Intel recently announced the plan for USB 3.0. Wireless USB is also getting a rev, which is somehow ironic considering that we still don’t have affordable wireless USB 1.0 gear. I would define affordable as under $100 and current prices for most hubs or adapters are hanging around twice that amount. There is even an argument that USB will take over firewire as more camcorders roll out with hard-drives instead of tape. I don’t like the idea of losing cable length (from 5 meters with USB 2 down to 2 meters with USB 3). However, I can’t think of a time that I used a longer cable. I’m not saying that some people wouldn’t have very good uses for longer cables, but I’m not one of them, and I suspect the majority of people aren’t either. Other than that, long live USB!