We may hope Santa will bring us gadgets that can make our dreams come true, but it is worth remembering that big technological leaps do not happen quickly. Nokia’s 9000 Communicator packed email, web browsing and fax into a phone in the mid-1990s, while the iPhone, launched in 2007, came after more than a decade of developments.
With hindsight, such breakthroughs seem to have been inevitable. But false dawns abound — and 2016 is likely to have more than its fair share of them.
In a period of abundant experimentation, the challenge will be telling which are harbingers of shifts in work and personal life and which are dead-ends in technology evolution.