If you can manage to look past the bummer of Mayan doomsday prophecies, 2012 looks pretty promising from a tech geek's point of view.
We're not going to have to wait very long for the technology scene to change in 2012, with CES (the Consumer Electronic Show) set to kick off in Las Vegas on Jan. 10. This year, hardware makers are expected to bring a long lineup of Ultrabooks, the super-thin, high-powered laptops which aim to compete with Apple's Macbook Air — I mentioned a few of these earlier in the year, such as the Asus Zenbook and the Toshiba Protege Z835. Intel's new CPU architecture, Ivy Bridge, is also expected to drop sometime in the summer, and it could make an early surprise appearance at CES.
The event will mark Microsoft's last CES keynote (as it has announced its intention to withdraw from the event) but expect Windows 8 to be featured, as the new operating system is likely to see a public beta release in February. Windows Phone 7 — as much as I want to dismiss anything out of Redmond — looks like a solid mobile OS, winning over many skeptics already.