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I’ve been read­ing all the excite­ment sur­round­ing Google’s new aug­mented real­ity project, Google Glasses.

In case you missed it, these are essen­tially Oakley-style sun­glasses with a lens-mounted HUD (the head-up dis­play fighter pilots use for alti­tude, vec­tor, tar­get­ing etc.). Wear­ing a pair, you can read and com­pose emails, view cal­en­dar events, check the weather, take phone calls and, accord­ing to the promo video accom­pa­ny­ing the launch, learn to play the ukulele.

While this all may appear like great fun, it’s being touted by some quite seri­ous tech journos as noth­ing less than the nat­ural replace­ment for the smart­phone as our pri­mary com­mu­ni­ca­tions device.

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AppleIn­sider has an arti­cle on the wider pos­si­bil­i­ties of mul­ti­touch for Apple beyond the iPhone. While the posi­tion­ing of this as being a “mega-platform” feels a lit­tle like jar­goni­tis, the idea makes per­fect sense.

The arti­cle is more focused on the effect this could have on Apple’s share price than on cus­tomers but the change in pos­si­ble user expe­ri­ence is surely the big story here.

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Happy new year, I hope Santa brought you every­thing you wished for (obvi­ously if you opted for peace on Earth you may have been some­what disappointed).

It’s cus­tom­ary at this time of year to make pre­dic­tions for the 12 months ahead. Of course, this is largely an exer­cise in ensur­ing you look pretty stu­pid at the end of the year. (It’s almost as if, sim­ply by pre­dict­ing the future, you can guar­an­tee that it won’t come to pass.) So with that in mind, and not want­ing to pass up the oppor­tu­nity of look­ing stu­pid, here are mine:

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This is a Chumby (the thing with the screen, not the cof­fee cup). And, out of the box, it doesn’t do a hell of a lot. OK, it does come with a clock/radio and – this is the impor­tant bit – a wire­less inter­net connection.

The inter­net con­nec­tion gives you access to an ever increas­ing range of Flash-based wid­gets that you can use to add extra func­tions to your Chumby. Using the touch-screen or squeeze-sensor, you can view pho­tos on Flickr, the lat­est news from Digg or your day ahead on Google Cal­en­dar – and in future, who knows what else. Of course if that was all, it wouldn’t be that inter­est­ing (wid­gets are not exactly new news).

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You can now tell pre­cisely how nuclear your Mac is get­ting with the Tem­per­a­ture Mon­i­tor wid­get. A quick F12 tells you exactly how hot your bat­tery is (mine is 32 degrees centi­grade as I type). In fact it’ll take read­ings from a whole bunch of tem­per­a­ture sen­sors on your Mac.

Now if only it would do some kind of James Bond style count­down when your bat­tery hits crit­i­cal so you could get to a safe distance…

Of course a mass prod­uct recall is almost every manufacturer’s idea of a night­mare. There must have been many sleep­less night’s at Dell and Apple (not to men­tion unbri­dled panic at Sony) over the whole laptop-incinerates-lap deba­cle. On the pos­i­tive side, at least every­one con­cerned will dis­cover whether their respec­tive PR agen­cies can live up to the ‘cri­sis man­age­ment’ boasts they served up at the pitch.

As a long­time Apple lap­top user, I learnt long ago that bare legs and my lap­top sim­ply didn’t mix (espe­cially if you have the power cord attached). Hav­ing said that, I also dis­cov­ered that I could save money on heat­ing by using my Mac instead.

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