Apple leads the top tech trends of the decade

As the first decade of this brand-new century draws to close it’s time to look back over the past 10 years and identify the big trends, the advanced devices, gizmos and gadgets that changed everything.

There were lots of new products and technology innovations. Here are the top five that I believe have had the most impact and offer the most potential for the next decade.

The iPhone – One device clearly leads the pack. The smartphone category became essential tech in 2000-2002 with the Blackberry, which was introduced in 1999 and slowly came to show us that we can be connected and wired 24 X 7. By 2003 we so enamored by the BlackBerry that we dubbed it the CrackBerry. Early adapters developed calluses on their thumbs because it was so addictive. But then in 2007 came Apple with the iPhone, which had the incredibly popular iPod music player it introduced in 2001 integrated right into the phone. I remember standing in a line outside at AT&T store for more than 24 hours with hundreds of people anxious to buy his first multi-function touch screen device. It was like that all over the country. Probably no other device can match the impact of the iPhone (and iPod) during the first ten years of the new century. It is the converged gadget of the decade.

Portable Computers -  Laptops have been around for a long time but got smaller, lighter, more powerful, more affordable and, by mid-decade, eventually replaced the desktop as the most used computer form in America. As the decade drew to a close laptops shrank down even more and developed a robust and inexpensive subspecies called netbooks,  tiny little minimalist computers that sold for just a couple hundred dollars.

Social Networking – Spurred on by the decade’s explosion of wi-fi and near universal broadband connectivity, these online gathering spots certainly became the single most impactful Internet trend of the decade. Facebook today has 350 million users. Twitter has over a hundred million more. Some people spend more time on Facebook then they do watching television. The social networking sites have become the world’s front porch, giving everyone an instant and audience of friends and followers. Social networking has become a key part of the American culture today.

Voice Recognition -  It has finally come of age. I’m dictating this entire post on a voice application called Dragon Naturally Speaking over my iPhone as I drive in my car, running some errands. I then will e-mail it to myself and clean it up and post it. After years of sputtering progress, the accuracy of voce recognition has finally improved enough to be useful. It still makes mistakes as we mumble and slur words, but the transcript is easily correctable, just as fixing typos and the occasionally transposed letters we put down when we’re typing on a keyboard.  Voice recognition holds great promise for the future but it will be remembered that it was finally perfected in 2009 .

e-Readers – The last year of the decade was the year e-Readers got legs. Started in 2007 by Amazon with its popular paperback-sized Kindle and its ability to download books and periodicals from the Internet, now joined by the Nook from Barnes & Noble, the Sony e-Reader and about-to-be-launched and even more sophisticated devices from Plastic Logic and Apple,  e-Readers will soon be an essential part of the way we consume the written word. As newspapers and magazines printed on dead trees become increasingly marginalized in reach, these new carry-anywhere gizmos will breathe new life into news, entertainment and publishing.

So those are the sea-changing innovations of the past ten years.

Ten years from now, when we’re reviewing the century’s second decade, I predict that we will see a morphing of all five of the above trends into one single device that does it all and much more.

And It think we’ll see the first indicator of that this coming March or April when Apple releases its much-anticipated Apple Tablet.

Think of it. Apple clearly has it figured out this convergence trend the best. Right now the iPhone is so full-featured that it is, for all practical consideration, a miniature computer. It does use voice recognition, it can be an e-Reader and it is the smartest of the smartphones, as well as a video player and music player.

Apple gets my clear nod for being the most innovative tech company of the decade, first with the iPod, then the iPhone. The coming Tablet will give it a good shot at continuing to hold that title for much of the next ten years.