2008 promises to be a breakthrough year in the technological & scienctific world… (well, all years are the same, no?)
MMVIII:
- International Year of Planet Earth
- European Year of Intercultural Dialogue
- Australian Year of the Scout
- International Year of the Potato (chips or fries?)
- International Year of Sanitation
- Chinese Year of the Rat

Apple Macbook Touch?
That’s one rumour that has been flying around for quite a long time - that Apple has a Newton (a prehistoric PDA) successor in works… which is in fact a UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) on Mac OS X with all those multi-touch goodies of the iPhone. Whatever it may be, it’s surely going to be a hit because it has a big white half-rotten apple logo at the back… & according to a new Apple patent, it’s supposed to fit in your iMac!
For the time being, be happy with the multi-touch Macbook Pro by Axilion (pic above) which is a touchscreen Macbook mod running on a normal OSX.

Nokia N99!
Finally… Nokia will be releasing the much awaited Nokia N99 Touchscreen S60 supercomputer with 8MP Carl Zeiss, HSDPA, WiMax, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, 16 GB on-board flash & GPS or DVB-H. And the N97 will be the non-touchscreen version with the same specs. That’s my prediction!
Unfortunately, recent reports suggest it may not be multi-touch, but stylus-based with haptics to keep the S60 backwards compatibility…

Keep an eye also for touch-sensitive keypads… (Motorola Rockr E8)

iPhone 2.0
If Nokia’s rolling out touchscreens, Apple won’t be sitting idle. All those hacks & mods must have certainly brought Steve Jobs to reality. Expect something different… 3G maybe? (See you at Macworld next week!)

Microsoft?
Bill Gates will be stepping down this year from the post of Chief Engineer… but it would hardly make any difference to the company.
Anyway, GOODBYE Bill!
Vista SP1 & XP SP3 will come in to fill the gap in your digital lives… & we might see some improvements in the Zune (Zunephone?) & the Xbox 360 (HD-DVD?).
But most importantly, we might see a Vista Tablet (multi-touch) edition coming up… as the manufacturers are already rolling out those multi-touch laptops (like the Dell Latitude XT). Microsoft have already demonstrated the Surface running on Vista…
2008 will be THE year of the TOUCH…

The UMPC
This will be the year when touchscreen UMPCs will get more affordable on the new Intel Menlow platform, the 3-watt 45nm 1.33GHz Silverthorne processors having just been launched at CES. In fact it was Microsoft that launched UMPCs with its Origami platform. Here’s a screen of the upcoming Origami 2.0 (based on Vista)… sounds promising!
Google
Knoll & Android will be the highlights of 2008 as Google tries to cash on Wikipedia’s success & tries to undermine Nokia’s S60 platform & Windows Mobile. However, Android already seems to have problems due to the lack of proper guidelines… so the first Gphone may come from China instead of Motorola… Also watch out for Google Gears & Gmail 2.0.
Google will introduce Image Analysis & Speech Recognition in Image & Video search. Gdrive will finally launch with a capacity of around 10 GB?
Google will be hungrier as ever, but only unknown start-ups will fall prey to its appetite since the acquisition business is wide open now…

Books
Harry Potter and the Sands of Time - Harry is forced out of retirement by the Dark Lord that has been resuscitated by a necromancer.
The Solomon Key by Dan Brown - this is almost for next year, but nevertheless it’s out on the 30th December 08… It will be centred on the Freemasons & most events are to be focused in the US. According to Wiki, it’s a sequel of Da Vinci Code… & will be following the storyline about another treasure linked with the Priory. What can be more important than the Holy Grail?
Book 3 of the Inheritance Cycle… (title may be Empire). Eragon was supposed to be a trilogy, but with the Book 3 being so large, Paolini has decided to create a Book 4 instead. Book 3 will be released on 23rd September 2008.

Films
Just as last year, 2008 will be full of sequels. Watch out for these:
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (spoiler - Dumbledore will NOT die.)
- The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
- Madagascar 2: The Crate Escape (another megahit!)
- The Dark Knight (Batman tries to find out why he’s called “bat” man)
- The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (The terracotta army is brought to life!!)
- The Incredible Hulk (there’s a 2nd Hulk running around!)
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Harrison Ford gets rejuvenated!)
- Rambo (Sylvester Stallone is BACK!)
- Bond 22 (more Aston Martini)
- Hellboy II - The Golden Army

Some of the less publicised movies…
- X-files Sequel (TBA) - more aliens?
- Meet the Spartans
- The Eye
- Dragonball (no Jap actors?)
- The Ruins
- The Forbidden Kingdom (Jet Chan & Jackie Li!!!)
- Iron Man
- The Day the Earth Stood Still
The whole list on Wiki.

TV Show
More Top Gear in 2008 - that's an event in itself… :P
Anyway, I expect reviews of the Nissan GTR Proto, the Reventón & a TG special in Australia or India or China!!! How hard can it be to be ambitious but rubbish!!

Games
StarCraft II will be released this year by Blizzard… Even before it’s released, I’m 200% sure this will be a massive hit!!! If you’ve played Warcraft III, you know why…
A C&C 3 Expansion Pack, Kane’s Wrath will also be released which is more role-playing than RTS.
There will be another Need for Speed out in November featuring… maybe the Reventón!! Nevertheless, I’m eagerly waiting for the v1.2 patch to be out for NFS ProStreet… because I will finally be able to drive the fastest production car in the world… the Bugatti Veyron 16.4! The v1.1 patch copied the cars in the game folders but didn’t unlock them. However with the v1.2, you’ll get the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, the Audi R8, the Aston Martin DBR9, the Koenigsegg CCX, the McLaren F1, the Porsche Carrera GT, the Porsche 911 GT3 RS & the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera!

Sports
Euro 2008: Expect Emotions
None of the British Isles teams have qualified… The Premier League is the best football league in the world, but England (the country that invented football!) could not qualify for the Euro 2008… Anyway, it’s the best thing that has happened to England… now they can start from scratch & prepare for the 2010 WC with all those young players.
- Group A: Switzerland, Czech Republic, Portugal, Turkey
- Group B: Austria, Croatia, Germany, Poland
- Group C: Netherlands, Italy, Romania, France
- Group D: Greece, Sweden, Spain, Russia
The favourites: Portugal, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, France
The outsiders: Switzerland, Turkey, Croatia, Russia
Since England is out, I’ll be supporting Portugal. Group C is the death group, with heavyweights like France, Netherlands & Italy. However watch out for the young Switzerland team that are on home turf… they may well create an upset (like Greece did 4 years ago).
More on Euro 2008.

Beijing 2008: One World, One Dream
On 08.08.08, at 08:08:08 pm CST (Mauritian time 04:08:08 pm), the Games of the XXIX Olympiad will officially start at the Nest (Beijing National Stadium). There will be 28 different sports & hopefully they will not be stained by doping scandals… The Chinese team have been preparing these games for more than 4 years… so we might witness a historic medal tally… US beware! & with all that air pollution, it is going to be really tough to compete with them.
More on Beijing 2008.

F1 Season 2008
Ferrari & McLaren unveiled their F1 cars this week. Alonso has gone back to Renault & Lewis Hamilton has signed a new contract with McLaren - $138M over 5 years. Kimi & Massa are still at Ferrari. The race is wide open… & the FIA has decided to spice up the fight! All cars are going to have a standard ECU (made by Microsoft!?!?), there would be no traction control (this is going to hurt when it rains), rpm of all engines are limited & aerodynamic improvements cannot be made over the season. There will also be a Singapore Grand Prix that will be held at night… Can’t wait for it to start!

World’s Tallest Building
The Burj Dubai is expected to become the world’s tallest building & the world’s tallest man-made structure of any type this year (current height is 600 m)… & achieve a total height of 818m upon completion in 2009.

Science
On April 9, the Chadrayaan I ISRO spacecraft will officially launch India’s moon-race… The spacecraft will contain numerous instruments (mainly for lunar surface analysis & water detection) but also a lunar impactor.
In May, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will start operation at CERN HQ in Geneva. The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator & will collide high energy protons with each other. Hopefully, this may help in detecting elementary particles like the Higgs Boson.
There’s the GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) that will be launched on May 16, to analyse micro black holes, gamma-ray bursts & gamma-ray emissions around the universe. This will help us to find out more about black holes because when a black hole takes birth (after the supernova explosion), it emits incredibly large amount of energy (the gamma-ray bursts).
On May 25, the Phoenix spacecraft will land on the North Pole of Mars near the polar ice caps (polar crater photo above). It will have a robotic arm that will dig in the ice to collect samples 50 cm below the surface & analyse them with onboard instruments (& hopefully find alien life). Phoenix also has onboard, attached to the deck, The Phoenix DVD - a special silica dvd with text & film on Mars, supposed to last for hundreds of years…

Climate Change
2008 - the International Year of Planet Earth
Just as 2007, 2008 will be one of the warmest years in the history of the thermometer… Since Al Gore has already made it clear that he’s not running for President, hopefully a Democrat will get elected, & he’ll be able to pass all his inconvenient controversial environmental bills…
Photovoltaic cells are getting cheaper & California has decided to build the largest solar cell farm in the world. There are also experimental solar mirror farms being tested in Europe that produce much more energy than conventional cells… & it is expected that the EU will draft legislation in 2008 to set minimum levels for the MPG of all EU cars (including supercars!). & we will definitely see a boom in all types of hybrids!
For Mauritius, I strongly condemn the idea of setting up coal-fired power stations… why not wind farms? Everywhere in the world (except China & India), most countries are going green… while we are moving backwards!
As for the oil price reaching a $100 a barrel, best solution would be to implement the E85 ethanol-fuel & research more onto oil based bio-diesel. & Toyota should consider importing those hybrid Priuses & Lexuses...

Fibre optics!
Yeah… someone said that Mauritius would be connected to a fibre-optic international cable (EASSY) in the near future… & that the project was supposed to be completed in late 2008! Where is it? All we know is that there’s another Fibre-to-Home project by UCL that is under government scrutiny… I can only pray it gets started in 2008... because it was supposed to be finished by 2008 (read more here).

Mauritius will be celebrating its 40th Anniversary of Independence & its 16th Anniversary of a Constitutional Republic in 2008. & for those who don’t know, we gained independence on the 12th March 1968…

Oh yeah… & there’s the second semester exams at UOM… :-(

So 2008 will be like any other year…
Here’s the whole list of scheduled events for 2008:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008