We’re well into 2009, but it’s never too late to look ahead at some of the new gadgets and product launches we’re looking forward to during the year. With one already-launched exception, here’s our roundup of the most interesting and/or useful gadgets that will be hitting stores during this calendar year. Just try and tell us there isn’t one here ready to pry that money out of your hand.

A Very Possible Apple Netbook/E-Book/10-inch Something

This one has been flying around the rumour sites recently, but was launched into the realm of very-possible when a source in a Taiwanese touchscreen manufacturer claimed that Apple has ordered a whole ton of 10-inch touchscreens. (the image above is a mockup created by someone at Gizmodo.)

The market is new, young, and could be (like the smartphone market of two years ago) theirs to take over. What’s it going to look like? Will there be a keyboard, or is it going to be like a giant iphone? My bet is a fantastic sort of larger iphone with a slide-out keyboard of some kind. Although to make that elegant and cheap might be kind of hard, and Steve Jobs has reportedly said that it’s impossible to ship something that costs $500 or less “without it being junk”, and thus it won’t happen.

But then… what are all those touchscreens for? One theory is a competing e-book reader, which would line Apple straight up against…

Amazon’s Kindle 2.0

This one has already launched, but will likely remain one of the top gadgets of the year. Not only did Amazon completely revamp the previously-awful industrial design of their first kindle, moving it much more towards an Apple-inspired direction (why does it always take companies that are not apple several tries to pull this off?), but they continued the free wireless service and increased the battery life to an insane level.

Until an e-book comes out that you can bend like paper and throw across the room, there probably won’t be any kind of massive revolution in the way we read, but as was argued here recently, there doesn’t need to be, as people have already proven themselves incredibly willing to read small text off woefully inadequate devices. I thought about reading a novel off my little cellphone the other day, for god’s sake.

The New ‘Premium’ Netbooks

2009 is finally going to be the year where netbooks move out of their initial phase, in which they showed up on the market, sold a ton, and began taking advantage of the internet-anywhere mentality as popularized by the iPhone.

The early efforts (as chronicled by us some time ago) were good, but lacked certain things: properly sized screens, long batteries, big HDs, etc. Towards the end of the year most manufacturers began releasing upgrades, and by now the near-ubiquitous acer aspire one has been replaced with an entirely new model. Same goes for the extremely popular MSI Wind, and the EEEPC, plus all the other netbooks coming out this year.

Battery life is constantly on the rise, and Intel is releasing the next generation of their tiny Atom chips, which will mean better performance in the same tiny packages. By Christmas of this upcoming year, you’re going to see an entirely new line of great netbooks on the market. And if Apple decides to join the fray? Look for standards to jump even higher.

USB 3

Sure, it’s hardly revolutionary, but it’s useful, and sometime in 2009 we’re going to see cable connections that will make everything much, much faster. Last year intel released all the specifications for USB 3, and in a few months we’ll be seeing the first devices featuring them.

How much faster is it? Let’s say you’ve just setup a new high-definition-equipped media center in your living room (media/streaming centers are likely to really explode this year), and you want to transfer that massive 24-gig HD movie you just downloaded to it. With a normal USB 2.0 connection, you’re looking at about 17 minutes, whereas with USB 3.0, the whole thing will take just over a minute.

It’s all backwards compatible, of course, and is one more step towards a seamless, incredibly fast data transfer between applications. Of course, back when USB 2.0 was an exciting, new thing, the biggest movies could get (if you’re talking about your standard old DIVX here) was around 700megs.

Why does that matter? Well, it may very well be possible that as we continue to invent new and exciting ways to transfer all our data, we’ll just keep getting more and more of that data, in bigger and bigger sizes. So maybe we won’t ever notice higher speeds after all.

(top image from Objectified: A Documentary Film)

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