THE 2-IN-1 TREND REPORT The future of hybrid tech and our 21st century commute April 2015
CONTENTS 03 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 16 2035 04 THE HYBRID REVOLUTION 18 CONCLUSION 08 2020 19 APPENDIX 10 2025 FOREWORD Our everyday commute connects us between home and work. Part of our habitual routine, technology sits at its very heart; from the trains we board, to the cars we drive and the devices we take with us to stay connected. At Toshiba, we understand that our customers want technology that improves their everyday lives and, on their daily commute, a device that caters for more than just one purpose. Enter our latest detachable the Satellite Click-Mini. An affordable hybrid device, the Satellite Click-Mini features a detachable keyboard, making it a tablet and laptop in one. Compact in size for ultra-mobility, it s the perfect commuting companion for work and entertainment. With 2-in-1 devices such as the Satellite Click-Mini setting a new commuter trend, we ve gone one step further at Toshiba to ask the question; what 2-in-1 technology might we see in the future? Working with Futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson to commission this European report, we ve uncovered exactly what those 2-in-1 innovations might be - in five, 10 and 20 years to come. Contents Toshiba 1
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Tablets are ubiquitous today, and sometimes they are perfect for what we need. Just like the Star Trek hand-held tablets, they are a perfect shape and size and weight for many tasks, with a high resolution display, light weight and yet enough computing power for many tasks. However, sometimes we still need to type and a number of 2-in-1 hybrids have appeared that behave like a traditional laptop but have a detachable display that can act as a tablet, giving the best of both worlds. How will this market evolve in coming years, as people s lifestyles change and as we get used to new interface styles? When a tablet display is too small, it is possible to throw the image onto a nearby TV screen. This use of other displays is a clue to the future of hybrids. 2 Executive Summary Toshiba 3
THE HYBRID REVOLUTION Hybrid is a growing descriptor, just like cloud. Starting in one industry, the idea has spread to others. We are used to hybrid cars now, using both electric and petrol engines. Toshiba makes a hybrid diesel-electric locomotive trains, along with their SCiB battery for electric cars. We have combined heat and power boilers in our homes, making electricity and heat. In IT, hybrid operating systems have already come and gone. However, having prematurely pronounced the end of laptops when tablets arrived, people have discovered that they are not always perfect for every task, and 2-in-1 devices meet that new-found market. This allows the full interaction capabilities of a laptop with a touchscreen with the convenient portability of a tablet. Neither the laptop nor the tablet can fulfil every role perfectly, and Toshiba s new 2-in-1 hybrid, the Satellite Click Mini gives the user the flexibility to enjoy the best of both worlds. Introduction to the Satellite Click Mini The Satellite Click Mini is a 9 inch hybrid with a better than-hd 1920 x 1200 pixel display aimed at giving a high quality entertainment experience alongside full PC capability, in a form factor that can easily fit in a handbag or briefcase. Up to 13 hours of battery life (split equally between the tablet and keyboard sections) means it doesn t need to be charged on the go every day. It will allow people to make the most of their daily commute whether they want to watch a film or do some work, and have enough power to be useful during the work day too. Lifestyle survey The Censuswide Survey* gives useful clues for how this market might develop in coming years. Almost 60% of people in the UK, France and Germany spend 30 minutes or more commuting each day and over 30% spend over 45 minutes. This provides lots of time in which to use devices. Twice as many Germans (38%) use the train as Brits (18.5%), with the French at 28%, but almost twice as many Brits walk as Germans (32% compared to 17%). Car use is slightly over 50% in each country, but as cars become self-driving, more people will use them, and their time in the car will become free too, so by tripling the potential user base, migrating to self-driving cars will add hugely to use of devices in commuting. Only 1 in 6 people don t do anything on their commute. Around 60% of people use devices to listen to music, over 20% read, 17.5% do emails and a similar number use social media, with around 10% playing games. These are all standard applications for the smartphones that 80% carry today, but also for devices like the Satellite Click Mini (33% carry a tablet, laptop, 2-in-1 or e-reader today). A marked difference appears for how people felt affected by technology in their commute. Only 37% of Brits said it kept them entertained compared to 47% of French and 52% of Germans, but the key observation was that well over half in each area said it made their commute more enjoyable overall. A slightly higher proportion still said they wanted technology to entertain them in future. The Germans and Brits had 28% wanting more help with productivity compared to 21.7% of French, who wanted more assistance with keeping fit or relaxing. When asked about what technologies they really want in the next 5 years, almost exactly half wanted connectivity on all public transport, especially the French. 36% wanted self-driving cars and a quarter wanted interactive maps. Well over a quarter of British simply don t care for technology, but far fewer people agreed in France and Germany. The UK also had a very low number in favour of greater surveillance, with only 10.6% in favour of personal profile recognition, compared to 16% and 20% in France and Germany. The overwhelming conclusion from this survey is that on most factors, people across Europe already consistently appreciate the impact of technology on their everyday commutes and want more of it in future. Very few people don t want it at all. The differences between countries are mostly small with only a few of any significance and the differences between cities are the ones one might expect - different length of commute or use of public transport. These indicate the potential time available to use technology rather than the desire to do so. The kinds of applications they use and want are the sort that the Satellite Click Mini can target, so its future market potential looks good. The 20-30% who want to do more of those things that require typing would be the key market segment, but given that 2-in-1 penetration is only 2% so far and that self-driving cars will greatly increase the number of potential users, there is clearly huge scope for market expansion. 4 The Hybrid Revolution Toshiba 5
Over a third of Brits want to see self-driving cars on their commute in the next 5 years *.
2020 Lifestyle and commuting changes by 2020 By 2020, a few self-driving cars will be starting to appear on European roads. Instead of driving, owners will be able to use their travel time for work or recreation, multitasking just like train or bus passengers. Maybe they ll find out more about the areas they pass through daily on the way to the office, or socialise with the other drivers going the same way. Some might use the extra time to work, allowing them to leave the house later and the office earlier. Cheaper displays By 2020, displays will be far cheaper than today and we might want to have a number of displays controlled by the 2-in-1 device rather than just one. Its own display would remain as the main one, and may be higher quality than the others, but a number of lower quality displays may appear in various locations around the home, office and car. If cost is low, displays don t need to be multipurpose and cheap displays could stay in one place filling just one useful role. Even seat-back displays on public transport such as trains or planes might work with it. Some of these displays might have a fixed purpose, such as acting as a home message tablet on a fridge front, a recipe book or TV guide, others would work just like the main hybrid display and show images appropriate to whichever app is currently being used. Digital cards Smaller displays would have a role too. Playing-card sized displays would easily fit in a pocket or handbag and might be dedicated to showing a social network page of a close friend of favourite celebrity. Some of these small displays would use digital ink displays that only need power to change the image, and that power could be provided directly from the hybrid via a USB connection. Image above: Digital cards Other displays Dual processing Image Above: Toshiba Smart TV By 2020, we will also have a wide range of virtual and augmented reality headsets too, as well as Toshiba Glass, and these could also work with the hybrid as additional display space. An image might start out on the hybrid display and then an immersive 3D version might be thrown onto the visor. Virtual and augmented reality will become very common platforms for a range of apps, but much of the processing and any typing needed might still be based on the hybrid. Smart TV and internet hof things interfaces By 2020, the internet of things will be much richer, and our homes and office will be populated with a wide range of devices filling diverse roles. The Satellite Click Mini or its successors would offer the wide range of interface types a user needs to send widely varying commands or collect data from sensors. Some of the devices such as home entertainment systems might have their own displays and the Satellite Click Mini keyboard would offer a vastly easier means of typing in their search or messaging applications. Since it will become common to use the display as a tablet and also to use the keyboard section to link to other displays, some replication of processing and storage would be appropriate so that each half acts fully as a capable computer in its own right. The two sections could easily sync via wireless or the net as they need, and could even combine their processing when in close proximity to double performance. Office robotics We won t have homes full of robots in 5 years, but many companies will be starting to use robots in reception and assistant roles. Human-like robots such as Toshiba s Aiko Chihira are designed with this in mind and for many people, this will be their first encounter with robots. 8 2020 Toshiba 9
Image left: Holographic displays Image right: Video tattoo 2025 Lifestyle and commuting changes by 2025 Self-driving cars will be more common and the 2-in-1 will be able to use other displays provided in the car. The interior car décor might even use fabrics and display panels and adjustable seats or temperature that all adjust in advance to the passenger s taste, controlled by the 2-in-1. It would provide and control the content on the entertainment system too. Wherever the person goes, it could act as their familiar hub to control other accessible IT in the area. Holographic displays Ten years is almost IT eternity and our computers will be very different, but Toshiba has demonstrated that it is very comfortable leading innovation. The familiar sci-fi free-floating holographic displays will be here by then, but waving hands and talking isn t always the best way of doing things, and the 2-in-1 model will still be appropriate. A hand-held controller and keyboards will still provide more capability that hand and voice alone so they will still be around. Digital jewellery Ongoing miniaturisation will mean that we have a lot of tiny IT devices around our person. These will have distinct roles, such as identification and security or emitting an avatar for augmented reality. Some will just be jewellery that is digitally controlled. The 2-in-1 will likely be needed to act as a central control point to coordinate and interact with them all, since they will obviously be far too small to have their own interfaces. Video tattoos Work in 2025 will be mostly based on human skills and personal services rather than information work in offices, much of which will be done by AI, so visual communications will be more important, using 3D and even holographic images. Projection systems are likely to be built into the hybrid itself, or glasses such as Toshiba Glass could be used to produce an immersive environment. This will help get the best feeling of presence to make communication a fully emotionally rich experience. It is very possible that today s Satellite Click Mini might evolve into a future hybrid that uses glasses as the main display, but a full changeover is unlikely by 2025, so the user might have both the tablet and Toshiba Glass and use each frequently wherever appropriate. Mobile hub People will still want to do things on the move, and having a personal device that can link to the systems nearby will offer easier interfacing. Preferences and personal data could be cloud-based, but having much of it local avoids problems with poor signals, and sadly we ll still have that problem in 2025. The personal 2-in-1 therefore sits at the centre of the personal world with other nearby interfaces acting as additional space or assigned specific roles. We have already seen prototype demonstrations of electronics printed on thin membranes today, designed to adhere well to the skin surface for medical monitoring purposes. By 2025, these printed membranes will include display capability, and possibly even be touch sensitive, so they could behave essentially as additional displays for the 2-in-1. They might still act as biomedical monitoring displays, but more likely, most will behave simply as video tattoos, as part of body decoration that can show changing patterns and colours or even show video or pictures. These video tattoos would need to have some sort of control system, communication, storage and processing, so the 2-in-1 would be ideal. 10 2025 Toshiba 11
At present, Aiko Chihara can mimic only simple movement such as exchanging greetings and signing in Japanese, but Toshiba will integrate its wide-ranging technologies in areas including sensing, speech synthesis, speech recognition and robotic control to realize a more sophisticated social robot by 2020. Powerful ai residence A great deal of work done today by knowledge professionals will be done by their computers in 2025, using highly advanced AI systems. The AI will interact so naturally it will almost seem to be a colleague. This will upskill workers in every field to do more difficult tasks, enhancing their performance and giving a higher quality of life through better job satisfaction. As it takes over more intellectual and administrative tasks, it frees the person to concentrate more on human interactions and higher level work. It is paradoxical but pleasing that the higher the technology becomes, the more it forces people to concentrate more on being human. The AI will gradually come to feel like a friend, and people will build emotional bonds with their AIs. Aiko Chihira will likely have a large family of descendants by then, with robots starting to do simple professional jobs using advanced AI as vwell as just acting as human interfaces in reception. Batteries v supercapacitors Some electronic devices in 10 years will be powered by electronic components called super-capacitors instead of batteries but either way, these will be charged quickly and frequently by devices built into furniture that work in much the same way as today s electric toothbrush chargers. Frequent charging means smaller batteries and that will make them lighter. Fuel cells have been suggested as future power sources many times, but progress has been slow and progress in supercapacitors may remove incentives for their further development, at least for powering IT devices. Image above: Powerful ai residence 12 2025 Toshiba 13
In the UK, we spend on average 38 minutes commuting to work every day *.
of them will number among your best friends. We will have a very wide range of computing devices. Not all need to be ultra-smart and in many cases that would even be a disadvantage. But it puts a new meaning on hybrid. When a machine has such a high level of intelligence and there is a transparent thought-based link between the brain and the machine, the person begins to converge with the machine. Thought recognition interface 2035 will have all the sci-fi interfaces you ve ever seen and a lot you haven t. Thought recognition will be commonplace, along with gesture and expression recognition, all working with highly advanced AI that knows you better than you do. Your computer will very likely use robot bodies to move around and do things too. It doesn t have to be physically present in the robot, and can control their actions from afar, while using their sensors as if it were on board. Conscious ai assistants Invisible computing will surround us. Processing and storage devices, communications and sensors will all be invisibly small, but will be everywhere. The cloud won t be centralised server farms, but a true cloud, with devices spread as a fine mist throughout our everyday world. Some of those devices will be very smart. They will know what is required and do their best to achieve it without further instruction. Self-organisation will make it far easier to deploy smart systems that add intelligence to our everyday environment. The result will be a smart environment that understands and responds to simple voice commands. If a request needs more advanced intelligence, it would simply be routed wherever is needed to provide it. 2035 Life and commuting changes by 2035 In 2035, we will have a lot of robots sharing our everyday environment, with lifelike human appearance and personalities, able to communicate well, even in sign language. These will provide some of the computing we need and will interact with other equipment to control things, so having a central personal control device will be less important. However, watching any episode of Star Trek is enough to confirm that we will still see tablets and other portable devices, even some keyboards. Toshiba 2035 products Technology companies like Toshiba will have gone through several generations of IT and even tomorrow s new releases will be historical curiosities in their corporate museum in 20 years. With a highly diverse portfolio, they have every chance of still being an industry leader and although the Satellite Click Mini may be history, its descendants will probably still be playing important roles in our lives. Digital makeup The printed electronics used for 2025 video tattoos could evolve into invisible printed circuitry on the skin surface that could control digital makeup. Smart makeup would be made of particles that can be oriented to diffract the light and make colours just like scales on a butterfly wing. These would be suspended in the makeup which could be applied freely over the face, controlled by the electronics circuits in each area, so makeup on lips, eyelids, or cheeks would appear differently. The display section of the 2-in-1 could act as a digital mirror to allow the wearer to adjust their makeup. A woman might apply it in just a few seconds, then touch an icon that represents how she wants to look, and the makeup would instantly change to reflect that picture. The makeup could be programmed to change during the day according to location, time or other context. Advanced versions of it could even change at video speed to make the skin surface into just another computer display, with similar functionality to video tattoos. As makeup becomes more techy, more men might start using it too. Brain enhancement IT By 2035, we may well have some simple links to the brain to augment memory and even IQ or to act as a general IT interface. The descendants to the Satellite Click Mini will in all likelihood have human-level intelligence and some Image above: Conscious ai assistants Image above:full sensory virtual reality Full sensory virtual reality VR will be familiar to many people even in 2020 but although vision and sound can be replicated already, other senses can t. Attempts at providing a feeling of touching something are still pretty crude and rely mainly on force feedback and vibration. By 2035, direct links into the brain will enable any sense to be used in VR. Full sensory VR will seem like a waking dream, or even reality. Real and virtual worlds will interact and converge, making the real world richer and the virtual world more capable. 16 2035 Toshiba 17
APPENDIX About Toshiba Toshiba Corporation, a Fortune Global 500 company, channels world-class capabilities in advanced electronic and electrical product and systems into five strategic business domains: Energy & Infrastructure, Community Solutions, Healthcare Systems & Services, Electronic Devices & Components, and Lifestyles Products & Services. Guided by the principles of The Basic Commitment of the Toshiba Group, Committed to People, Committed to the Future, Toshiba promotes global operations towards securing Growth Through Creativity and Innovation, and is contributing to the achievement of a world in which people everywhere live in safe, secure and comfortable society. Founded in Tokyo in 1875, today s Toshiba is at the heart of a global network of over 590 consolidated companies employing over 200,000 people worldwide, with annual sales surpassing 6.5 trillion yen (US$63 billion). To find out more about Toshiba, visit www.toshiba.co.jp/index.htm Toshiba Europe GmbH, headquartered in Neuss, Germany, is a fully owned subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, Tokyo. CONCLUSION New technologies will come and go over the years, but the same spirit of innovation that made it will make the new technologies that replace it. That won t change and innovative companies such as Toshiba will drive this movement. The only losers are companies that hide in the corner hoping the future won t happen. The rest of us gain from innovation, as our lives are made richer by an endless stream of new technology that improves every aspect of life. The Satellite Click Mini itself won t be around in 20 years, but it has sparked a hybrid 2-in-1 trend that we will most definitely see filter in to future technologies that ll feature on our everyday commutes. Dr Ian Pearson futurologist Report contributors Ian Pearson is a full time futurologist, tracking and predicting developments across a wide range of technology, business, society, politics and the environment. He is a Maths and Physics graduate, a Doctor of Science, and has worked in numerous branches of engineering, from aeronautics to cybernetics, sustainable transport to electronic cosmetics. His inventions include text messaging and the active contact lens. He was BT s full-time futurologist from 1991 to 2007 and now runs Futurizon, a small futures institute. He writes, lectures and consults globally on all aspects of the technology-driven future. He has written several books and made nearly 600 TV and radio appearances. He is a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society and Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce, and the World Innovation Foundation. Report references *Research was commissioned by Censuswide, polling 1000 respondents between the ages of 18-35 in the UK (Nationwide), 1000 respondents France (in Paris, Lille and Marseille) and also 1000 respondents in Germany (in Berlin, Munich and Cologne) Contact details Fever PR 020 3747 3030 toshibapressoffice@feverpr.com 18 Conclusion Toshiba Appendix Toshiba 19