In 10 Years, 99 Percent of Devices To Be Connected—CEA’s DuBravac

SAN DIEGO -- Spectrum constraints, connectivity beyond traditional consumer electronics devices, the cloud, emerging input interfaces and battery life were among the topics in the Five Technologies to Watch session that opened the CEA Industry Forum Monday. Jason Oxman, CEA senior vice president-industry affairs, spoke of the “looming spectrum crisis” due to consumer demand for wireless broadcast services and reiterated CEA’s position that there needs to be more spectrum allocated for wireless consumer devices. “We're not quite at a crisis point,” said Roger Cheng, senior writer for CNET, “but we're heading toward a spectrum crunch,” he said, citing consumers’ increased usage as they use wireless devices for listening to music, watching movies and playing games.

According to CEA figures, 171 million connected devices sold last year, and all of them “leveraged some type of spectrum,” said Shawn DuBravac, director of research for CEA. He said consumers increasingly want to be able to connect their devices for movies, email and other content “regardless of where they are or what device they're on” both inside and outside the home. Ten years from now, “we're going to look back at that number and say look how small that was,” he said. By then 99 percent of devices will connect to other devices and information pools, DuBravac said.

While today connected electronics encompass traditional CE products -- Blu-ray players, TVs, game players, smartphones and tablets -- wireless connectivity will expand outside of the traditional CE space, Oxman said. Cheng said dog collars and pill bottles are “already getting connected.” The impetus is on carriers to allocate resources to get CE makers and small “mom and pop developers” to create those types of next-gen devices, he said.

At CES 2012, wireless health, tablets and more connected devices will be in the spotlight, panelists said. DuBravac mentioned connected heart sensors and cars that can check status of engine and schedule an update to maintenance “by itself.” The cloud is behind much of the emerging connectivity, DuBravac said, as consumers are becoming more comfortable with the technology. Consumers have wanted to be able to access their content across devices, which used to be done on a device-to-device basis. Now, he said, it’s being done via the cloud where consumers upload information to the cloud and bring it back down. As a result, “we talk a lot about download speed, but it’s much more meaningful to talk about upload speed and how fast we can move content up into the cloud and then pull it back down,” he said. He referred to connected cameras as an example where upload speed is important.

The emergence of digital lockers is the next transition in CE, following the shift from analog to digital technology, DuBravac said. “The next evolution is managing those digital assets so you don’t have multiple copies of the same digital asset,” he said. That’s the goal of services including iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud and Dropbox, and cloud-based storage could change the way consumers shop for phones and other hardware, Oxman said. Having increasing amounts of memory on a phone won’t be as important when content is stored in the cloud, he said.

Within a year, consumers will have a higher comfort level with cloud technology, but the infrastructure currently isn’t in place to support cloud-based interaction, Cheng said. Cloud-based services are great in principle, but are not yet available on a widespread basis to be able to support consumer needs wherever they are, he said. Wireless networks “aren’t mature enough” yet to be able to handle all that consumers want to do in the cloud, he said.

User interface will be an emerging story for 2012, said DuBravac. “We're starting to raise generations on a new user input,” he said, citing swipe technology on touch-based devices including smartphones and tablets. He called touch a “hybrid technology that gets us from the keystroke input to a much more natural interface.” Next year, the industry will see an expansion to TVs of the type of motion control that debuted in Microsoft’s Kinect. The fast adoption of Kinect -- 8 million devices sold in 60 days -- shows consumers’ willingness to accept other inputs, he said, and often, trends that start in the gaming market “parlay into more mainstream services.” Over the next 3 years, gesture-based control will become a more mainstream input whether it’s the TV or other devices, he said. Sensors that open car door locks or start a vehicle based on the proximity of the key to the starter are also inputs, he said.

"We're changing the way we interact with devices,” he said. The death of the keyboard isn’t imminent, though, he said. Keyboards, physical media and local memory will be used “longer than we expect,” DuBravac said, but touch is the first step in the transition. Cheng noted that fewer smartphones are being designed with physical keyboards today. “The option of a keyboard won’t be necessary down the line,” he said.

A looming issue for consumers that’s lagging behind advancements in other areas of technology is battery life, panelists said. Cheng called it a “pet peeve” of consumers. As many advances as there have been in many areas of technology, there has been a “startling lack of advances” in the battery technology that powers the devices, Cheng said. The biggest culprits are 4G phones, he said, some lasting just half a day. Cases with extra batteries are supplemental solutions, he said.

DuBravac referred to an “increasing run time gap” between batteries and technology. Moore’s Law dictates over what time computer speed is doubling, typically over 18 or 24 months. Batteries double capacity every 10 years, he said, causing the run time gap to continue to widen. There has been a big push toward fuel cell technology and other emerging technologies to minimize the gap, he said. Meantime, over the past 12 months devices have evolved to address power constraints. He cited MacBook Air and Ultrabooks that use flash-based memory instead of hard drives to improve battery life.