In a release exuberantly titled “Lumia 900 Introduction to Trigger Smartphone Renaissance for Nokia and Microsoft,” IHS iSuppli analyst Wayne Lam has some predictions about where the phone market is going between now and 2015:

Largely based on Nokia’s strong support, Windows Phone is set to regain the No. 2 rank in the smartphone operating system in 2015. Finnish-based Nokia in 2009 lost its second-place worldwide ranking because of rising competition from Google Inc.’s Android and Apple Inc.’s iOS.

In 2015, however, Windows Phone will account for 16.7 percent of the smartphones shipped, up from less than 2 percent in 2011, according to the IHS iSuppli Mobile & Wireless Communications Service at information and analysis provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). This will allow Windows Phone to slightly surpass Apple’s iOS to retake the market’s second rank behind Android, as presented in the table below.

That’s awfully confident-sounding. Windows Phone is “set” to become #2 by 2015 and “will” have market share of 16.7 percent and “will” overtake iOS. And hey, it’s an analyst who knows his stuff doing the talking, so the rest of us should pay attention.

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In 1982, the New York Times reported on an eerily prescient report from the Institute of the Future about where computing and communications would take us by the 21st century.

This futuristic clip–supposedly produced in 1966–pretty much nails what home computers would eventually give us: online shopping, e-mail, banking, Webcams, multiple monitors, printers, self-healing Internet, and all.

(Via By Ken Levine)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about IDC’s projections for smartphone operating-system marketshare in 2015, and came to the conclusion that the whole exercise of predicting phone sales that far in the future is pointless–at least if you’re doing so in a form which suggests a scientific approach.

Now IDC rival Gartner is making some 2015 predictions of its own. These ones are for tablets, and they forecast that Apple’s share will fall under 50 percent, Android will surge to nearly 40 percent, and QNX, WebOS, MeeGo, and everything else will fight over the remainder of the market.

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Research firm IDC–a sister company of my former employer, PCWorld–has released its latest estimates of the current and future marketshare of major smartphone operating systems. The headline news: It’s predicting that Android will continue to boom and that Microsoft’s Windows Phone, currently on the ropes, will bounce back to second place by 2015.

Here are IDC’s numbers for 2011 and 2015 (I swiped them from Don Reisinger’s post at Cnet):

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Sleep in Wednesday morning. See an early movie. Perform admirable charity work. Do whatever you want–you’ll have the time, because you won’t have to keep tabs on Apple’s iPad event, because the Technologizer community has made its traditional, traditionally uncanny predictions about what will transpire. And here they are.

Oh, okay, I jest. Actually, I hope you’ll attend our live coverage at 10am PT over at Technologizer/ipad2. I’ll be reporting from San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center and will be joined in the Technologizer newsodrome by Ed. We’ll also have a special guest star from Techland: Doug Aamoth. And much of the color commentary will come from…you guys.

Back to your predictions. More than two hundred of you made ‘em, and as usual, I’ve aggregated them all into one unified set of prognostications. For questions in which you were only allowed to make one prediction, we’re going with the answer that a plurality of you chose. If you were allowed to make multiple predictions, then any one that got at least fifty percent of the votes counts. Got that?

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On Wednesday, March 2nd at 10am PT, Apple will hold its iPad event. (I’ll provide live coverage from San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center.) That gives us very little time to speculate about the new tablet and related matters–and as usual, I’m going to ask you guys to do most of the speculating so I can avoid looking foolish.

Click here, and you’ll be able to spend a few minutes making predictions about the next-generation iPad, the next generation of iPad software, and other aspects of Wednesday’s announcements. (Please take the survey by 10pm PT tonight, March 1st.) As usual, I’ll aggregate your results into one collective set of predictions by the Technologizer community. We’ll publish those before all is revealed at Apple’s event–and then come back to them afterwards to judge just how uncannily accurate you were this time around. (At past Apple events, your track record isn’t perfect, but it’s still way better than I’d do on my own.)

Thanks in advance for participating, and I hope to see you at Wednesday’s liveblog…

Once again, in time-honored Technologizer tradition, I’m asking you to make tech-related predictions about the year ahead. (As a group, you guys seem to be much better at it than I am.) And we’re offering an incentive: Everyone who submits a prediction will be entered in a random drawing for a $150 Amazon.com gift card.

Here are the official rules for this little exercise:

• 1. Enter by making predictions about technology news we’ll see in 2011. They can involve products, companies, technologies, people, or any combination of the above. Serious ones are preferable to silly ones.
• 2. You can submit predictions in any of three ways:
  • Make the predictions by adding comments to this post; please provide a working e-mail address in the specified field. (Your e-mail address won’t be published, and we won’t use it for any purpose except to contact you in relation to the contest.)
  • Submit a prediction on Twitter by tweeting me at @harrymccracken. (You can optionally use the hashtag #tpredicts as well.) Be sure to follow me so that I can direct message you if you win.
  • Post your prediction to Technologizer’s Facebook page (click the Status link near the top).

You can submit more than one set of predictions if you like, but multiple submissions won’t increase your chances of winning.

• 3. Everyone who enters gets one chance at winning the $150 Amazon.com gift card. We’ll choose our favorite entries, and they’ll get an additional four chances a piece at winning the gift certificate. (In other words: The best contributions will have a five times higher chance of winning.) The winner will be chosen in a random drawing.
• 4. Favorites will be judged for creativity, plausibility, and quality of writing. Being interesting counts, but ones that sound plausible will have an edge on ones that don’t–”Google will release a version of Chrome OS for desktop computers” might be a favorite, but “Google will announce it’s opening an office on Jupiter” would not.
• 5. Feel free to make multiple predictions in one comment, and take as much space as you need. We may use your entry in articles based on the contest, and reserve the right to delete entries.
• 6. The contest will close at 12am midnight PT on Saturday, January 1st, 2011–that is, as ring in the new year–so please enter by then; we’ll notify a winner by Monday, January 3rd. We’ll also publish a story with some of our favorite predictions.

Good luck, and have fun–and if you need inspiration, check out the reports on the Technologizer community’s predictions for 2009 and 2010.

Here at Technologizer, it’s our new years’ tradition that I avoid making any predictions of my own and instead invite you to do so. Back at the end of 2009, you submitted dozens of predictions for 2010. Strangely, none of them involved a prototype iPhone being lost in a bar and sold to a tech blog. But you got lots of things right–and even your prognostications that didn’t pan out make for interesting reading. (I’ll get some of them were simply premature by a year or so.) I’d say you’re as good at this game as most of the folks who do it for a living.

After the jump, a recap of the predictions you made, and what actually happened. The bolded, bracketed comments after each prediction are mine–feel free to disagree with my conclusions. And please start thinking about 2011: Later this week, I’ll ask you to tell us what’s in store for the year ahead.
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Cnet’s Tom Krazit thinks that Google CEO Eric Schmidt should be careful with his visions of a profoundly computer-augmented future:

It’s not that Schmidt is wrong or misguided in making these predictions: the seeds for such a future were sown long ago. But Schmidt and Google never seem to understand how much they freak some people out when they evangelize a future that de-emphasizes the role of people in their day-to-day lives.

I agree that Schmidt’s enthusiasm can be unsettling, at least on first blush (which is not the same thing as saying that his predictions won’t come true, or that I won’t be happy if they do). When he talks about the end of human-driven cars, one of the questions that pops into my head is this: Does Google plan to run the computers that run the planet’s automobiles?

Bad news, Apple: The iPhone’s market share is poised to take a tumble over the next few years. Between now and 2014, in fact, iOS devices will fall from 14.7 percent of phones sold to 10.9 percent, a 25.9 percent drop. Android phones, meanwhile, will boom, going from 16.3 percent market share to 24.6 percent, a 51.2 percent bump. RIM’s BlackBerry OS will dip slightly, from 17.9 percent to 17.3 percent; Windows Mobile will go from 6.8 percent to 9.8 percent. And even though handsets based on Nokia’s Symbian will fall from 40.1 percent share to 32.9 percent, they’ll still outsell every other mobile OS.

That, at least, is the truth as predicted by research firm IDC. The company has released those numbers as part of its sales forecasts for “converged mobile device operating systems.” They certainly sound plausible. But I’m struck by how precise these 2014 numbers are. IDC’s phone experts clearly think they can extrapolate a great deal from the current trajectories of major phone operating systems.

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Earlier this week, I asked you to predict what Apple would announce at the music event it held yesterday. Time for a recap! (Executive summary: You got a bunch of stuff right but missed out on a few key points.)

You said: Apple will announce a new iPod Touch, a new iPod Nano, and a new Apple TV. It won’t announce any other new products.

What happened: Apple did announce a new Touch, a new Nano, and a new Apple TV. But it also unveiled a new iPod Shuffle. (It released a new version of iTunes as well, but I’ll cut you slack on that one, since I didn’t ask specifically about that app.)

You said: The iPad will get at least some of iOS 4′s new features.

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What will Apple announce at its music event? By noon or so tomorrow, we’ll know all there is to know. Let’s wrap up the period of blissful ignorance, rampant rumors, and informed speculation with our traditional Technologizer community predictions.

As usual, I surveyed you guys and asked you to give your best guesses at what the news will involve. For questions in which you could choose only one answer, whatever answer got a plurality of responses counts as the prediction. For questions that let you choose multiple answers, any answer that more than fifty percent of you chose counts as a prediction. (I’ll note the percentage that chose each answer).

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Apple is holding its traditional September music event this Wednesday at 10am PT. As is my wont, I’m going to avoid making any predictions by asking you to do so. Click here to take our quick survey. I’ll aggregate everyone’s best guesses and turn them into shared predictions from the Technologizer community. (I’ll publish them before the event so you can score at home, and again after the event so we can reflect on how we did–your track record when we’ve done this in the past is not bad at all.)

When you take the survey, you can choose to enter a drawing for a $100 gift card from the U.S. Apple Store. The survey and gift card giveaway end at 2pm PT on Tuesday, August 31st. We’ll notify a winner by September 2nd.

Have fun and good luck!

[NOTE: Please take the survey rather than leaving comments on this post. Thanks!]

Another Apple WWDC keynote has come and gone. (Here’s a transcript of our live coverage.) As usual, I cleverly avoided making any predictions of my own–if you don’t predict, you can’t be wrong–and instead invited you to participate in a survey which formed the basis of collective Technologizer predictions.

Hundreds of you took the bait. And you were right a lot more often than you were wrong–including on one point where I felt positive you’d be proven incorrect this morning.

After the jump, your predictions and today’s upshot.

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On Monday at 10am PT or thereabouts, Steve Jobs will take the stage at Apple’s WWDC 2010 conference and announce something. Maybe several somethings–including, just possibly, a new iPhone. I’ll be in the audience providing moment-by-moment live blog coverage at technologizer.com/wwdc2010, and hope you’ll stop by.

In the meantime, how about some predictions? Not by me–by you. Click here to take our short multiple-choice predictosurvey. [UPDATE: survey closed--thanks, everyone!] Before the keynote, I’ll publish your collective wisdom on what we’re likely to see. And then after Jobs has been heard from, I’ll revisit your guess to see how we did.

We tried this experiment at last year’s WWDC, and you guys made more accurate predictions than some big-deal pundits did. I have this weird feeling that you might find it even easier this year to figure out what’s in store, but let’s see…