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9 TECHNOLOGIES THAT NEED AN INSTANT UPGRADE
LAPTOP COOLING
LANDLINES
Many landlines are built on ancient
wiring, some only capable of data
transmissions around 14Kb/s.
There’s a great opportunity to
refresh the archaic network with
fiber optic connections.
Most laptops put their cooling
intake vents on the bottom of
the chassis, where your lap
blocks them. A better solution
is to draw air down through the
keyboard, à la Asus.
THE
INTERNAL
COMBUSTION
ENGINE
TELEVISION
REMOTES
With today’s Internetconnected TVs and the digital service cable providers
use, we should be able to
use smartphones and computers to control our TVs.
It’s time for a shift
from the old to the
new: a hydrogen fuel
cell electric car. The car runs
nearly silently, and has essentially no
emissions (save for a bit of H20).
CAR RADIOS
What we could really
get behind are Internetbased radios working
off of mobile broadband
services already blanketing most of the world.
CALCULATORS
There’s a whole world of new
functionality calculators can take
on, like wireless connectivity,
color displays, physics simulation,
and gaming. Not to mention
useful, educational applications.
PRINTERS
It’s time that printers got smarter. We’re talking things like
drivers (with no accompanying bloatware), smartphone connectivity, ability to access the print queue from any networkattached device, and affordable 3D printing.
14
MAXIMUMPC
AUG 2011
maximumpc.com
INTEGRATED VIDEO
ACCELERATORS
1
Integrated GPUs have made
some surprising performance
leaps lately—particularly in the
form of the new APUs from Intel
and AMD. Great, but we want
more. Is that greedy? Yes it is.
CURRENT-GEN
GAMING CONSOLES
These 5-plus-year-old systems are leading to
stagnation in the gaming industry. Epic Games
has already produced a tech
demo of its latest Unreal
Engine 3, pushing hard
for next-gen consoles to
get here faster.