KEY POINTS:
One of Hewlett-Packard's vice- presidents, Phil McKinney, says he is often introduced as the company's "eye candy".
The title has stuck not because of McKinney's good looks but because he gets to show off HP's new gadgets.
McKinney brought his technology titbits to Shanghai last week, using gadgets to illustrate a talk about the next 20 years of technology as part of HP's annual "Mobility Summit" showcase of the company's latest mobile products.
McKinney, who is chief technology officer for HP's personal systems group and also general manager of the company's gaming business unit, said he knew the pitfalls of looking 20 years into the future.
"The one thing in this space that I've learned over the years is the fact that as soon as you predict the future, odds are you're wrong."
His 20-year vision was a fairly conservative outlook compared with what some futurists are predicting.
"The physical and virtual worlds are going to blur," he said. By 2027 wireless networks would have enveloped the globe, the gadgets connected to them would have become smarter, and personalised information and entertainment would be available anywhere from any number of devices.
McKinney believes that by 2020 virtual worlds like the popular Second Life game will have become such an entrenched part of society users will consider them as "the communities they participate in" above and beyond their geographical neighbourhoods in the real world.
"Now that opens up a whole lot of issues with regards to social interactions and it opens up challenges for the legal system."
Already Second Life alone has several million users trading with one another and speculating on digital property through the exchange of a virtual currency which can be converted back into US dollars.
Stories abound of second-lifers swapping real world work for a lucrative existence in this digital nirvana.
One of the question this raises, says McKinney, is: "If someone breaks into your virtual house and steals your virtual goods, what's the legal structure?"
He predicts that by 2025 the legal system will undergo an overhaul to give online communities some form of recognised legal status.
On the gadget front, McKinney pulled out a prototype A4-size e-book reader which he said was the result of extensive consumer research aimed at solving an old technology issue: how to marry the convenience of paper-based reading with the storage and interactive possibilities of an electronic device.
One of the ultimate pursuits in the gadget world is the quest to combine all our technology requirements - the cellphone, camera, mobile PC, video and music players - into one device. McKinney said he doubted the single device would arrive "in my lifetime".
The challenge of finding a happy medium between conflicting requirements such as making a device small enough to be portable while at the same time giving it a screen big enough to be usable and a powerful enough battery meant a single device was unlikely before 2025, he said.
McKinney's musings all made perfect sense, but his presentation lacked the impact it could have had if he had gone for shock value and said, for example, that in two decades artificial intelligence researchers will have produced robots with superior intellects to humans.
British website Pocket-Link was under-whelmed by McKinney's vision, saying HP was "caught in a time warp" because competitors, including Sony, already had on the market the type of e-book readers he had presented as a prototype.
To be fair, McKinney's sensible, non-controversial glimpse into the technological future was probably tempered to appease HP's all-important marketing division. As a sprawling global technology giant with stakes in everything from personal printers to corporate IT infrastructure and consultancy, the business has little to gain from hyping-up the merely possible.
Its job is to focus on selling the gadgets of today, or to tantalise consumers with what will be released next month.
Another observer to comment on McKinney's speech was Carmi Levy, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research in London, who told the eChannelLine website the technology industry was moving too fast to realistically predict what will happen in three to five years, let alone in 20.
"It's important for any company to understand the general road map of the industry and their own longer-term strategy but you can only predict so much before you need to get back to the reality of running your shop today."
