Tech of the Future!

It’s the future! The future is totally here, and it’s totally awesome! CES 2011 has given us all a brief but mighty glimpse into what the next year holds in tech, and, well, let’s be fair. It looks a lot like last year.

That’s not totally fair – a lot of what’s coming means that the whiz-bang stuff from previous years is getting more numerous, more standardized, and best of all, cheaper. Like iPad-style tablets? Now Motorola, LG, Samsung and Blackberry all have real contenders hitting the stage that compete hugely on features and price, and mean we’re all just a Curry’s purchase away from tablet heaven. Fancy smartphones caught your eye? A slew of new Android and WinMo7 phones are coming, along with some new 3D TVs, new accessory gizmos, and some hilariously designed video goggles courtesy of Lady Gaga herself. Let’s see Ke$ha beat that.

If technology goes in ebbs and flows, where one year crazy new stuff comes out and the next it gets consolidated and polished, this year looks like it’s gonna be the latter. Where last year Apple busted out a shiny new phone design and the iPad, Kinect and Android made their first real impression, and 3D TVs made everybody shrug, this year Android busts out a new tablet friendly OS and shows up on a boatload of phones, tablets go from a field of one to a dozen, and everybody still shrugs at 3D. The stuff that worked last year gets cheaper and more common, and the stuff that didn’t gets laughed at.

For those with some folding money to spend, keep an eye out for the Motorola Xoom and Blackberry Playbook (new tablet goodness), the Nexus S (the latest version of Android), some fancy 3D video cameras, and a cup of soup that heats itself through magnetic induction. Yeah, I can’t make this stuff up.