In 2021 we see certain technological trends emerging including an increase in smart home products and re-emergence of travel tech ready to surface post coronavirus. Some of the most popular essential tech products this year are the 4th Generation Amazon Echo dot, the 2021 Apple iPad pro and the Oculus Quest 2 for virtual reality gaming.
4th Generation Amazon Echo Dot
This is the 4th generation of Amazon echo dot, it has a new mesh design. Compared with the old version, this new generation has a smaller body and more sleek appearance, “better sound quality”. In addition to the followings below, Alexa voice service continues to be upgraded (eg: smart home control & music playback).
It is compatible with:
Amazon alexa & echo devices Amazon music, spotify, iHeartRadio and tunein smart home devices IFTTT, wink, tp-link web services and more are also supported.
The 4th generation amazon echo dot enhances a lot compared with 3rd generation, in terms of appearance, sound quality and compatibility.
2021 iPad Pro
You can tell from the name that it’s a bigger than an iPad. It’s about 3/4 of the size of an A4 sheet of paper, but instead of being rectangular, it has rounded corners. The screen is 12.9 inches diagonally so it makes sense for Apple to call it a Pro rather than an Air. Yet it’s still light enough and robust enough to have been voted the best tablet for travel.
Being that big, you probably wouldn’t want to hold it with just 1 hand like an iPhone or iPad… you’ll really want to use both hands so the top right side can be operated using your thumb and the bottom left side (from the top) can be used using your other fingers.
The screen is “Retina” which means it’s really optimised for detailed graphics and has a lot of pixels. In the case of this iPad Pro, it has 2732 x 2048 so its over 5 million pixels on the iPad Pro. But since its larger, you can clearly see them even if they’re packed together… like you can tell the difference between individual pixels on an iPhone and this new iPad Pro.
It has a massive 12 Megapixel camera at the back so you can take very large pictures if you need to… though I doubt that’s what it’s meant for, since normal photos don’t generally get printed out unless they’re A3 sized – which is close to the iPad Pro.
The screen works with an apple pencil, which is a bit like the S Pen you get with a Galaxy Note.
The 2021 iPad pro comes in 2 colours – silver or space grey. You can order it with varying storage options from 128GB right up to 2TB.
Oculus Quest 2
The Oculus Quest is a standalone 6DOF virtual reality headset which requires no external hardware to operate apart from the XR camera. It features four ultra wide angle sensors on the front of the headset which utilise the tracking technology of the Oculus Touch Controllers to allow for full 360 degree movement in VR.
Quest features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor which is the same chip that’s found in the Samsung S8 smartphone and this helps to make Quest very powerful, especially for mobile VR.
The Oculus Quest 2 is one of the best selling VR headsets this year and this is certainly a trend to watch!
What do you think are the most popular essential tech products of 2021? Feel free to comment on our blog – we’d love to hear from you!