The last three years have been great fun if you're into your gadgets. Various technology themes have played out in delightful ways. Hard drives have become small, capacious, and ubiquitous, which means that the content we care about has become portable. You can take your music, your movies, and your TV programmes with you wherever you go. In a triumph for audio-nerds, it has become socially acceptable to wear unfeasibly large studio headphones in public places, in a Dom Joly world in which over-sized cellphones are replaced with huge doughnut-sized cans.

The content that we care about has become digital with ever more speed, convenience and ever great quality. You can now buy, if not DRM-free, then at least DRM-lite songs at a high bit rate from Apple's iTunes store and play them on any device (as long as you're partial to EMI's back catalogue.) People I really don't think of as very geeky now routinely, albeit illegally, download hit US TV shows like Heroes via ever more friendly peer-to-peer networks. This is creating the same inexorable pressure on the film and TV industries that forced to the music industry to create a digital supply chain and start providing its content in more flexible, portable formats. There are now great little portable video players like the recently announced Archos 405, which for around £120 allow you carry crystal sharp moving images where ever you go. No one bats an eyelid if you open your laptop on the Tube or watched a portable DVD player on the train.

Gaming has been through some huge shifts. We've had the Xbox 360, the PS3, the Nintendo's DS and the PSP, ushering in extraordinarily vivid and interesting gameplay, as well as the triumph of online gaming through Xbox Live, and the innovative social, casual play of the Nintendo Wii. My colleagues at GameSpot UK inform me that this Christmas will see probably the strongest slate of PC and console games that we've had for years. And Sony has announced intriguing plans for an online virtual world called Home, bringing avatars and social spaces to its console network. There's also been a feeding frenzy around virtual world and online gaming, with the long-awaited expansion pack to World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, as well as huge hype and interest in Second Life, which went implausibly mainstream over the last 12 months, filling mainstream media with images of the potential for online virtual worlds.

Apple's computer hardware has gone from strength to strength, PCs continue to get cheaper and more attractively designed, and everyone and his dog bought out a nice, slender laptop for business and a big fat laptop with a huge screen for pleasure. Blimey, Microsoft even managed, finally, to release a new upgrade to Windows. Google continued to dominate search, as well as providing all the software you actually need to do most of the things you actually do with a computer for, well, nothing. And social networking took over the mainstream in the form of Facebook, an unbelievably infectious form of online time-wasting that has cut through the metropolitan office worker caste like some terrifying web-based virus.

Last year saw the summer of high-definition TV, as consumers started to upgrade their televisions to watch the World Cup. (Sadly summer this year has been cancelled in Britain.) Cable and satellite providers finally began to roll out HD content in the UK, and now we are mired in a rotten format battle going on between Blu-ray and HD DVD, which is still ushering in a world of beautiful-looking films and TV programmes. Even civilians who don't care that much about AV started to buy cheap projectors, not for elaborate home cinemas, but because it's a great way to amuse the children when you've got a gang of sugar-frenzied toddlers to corral.

A prediction: I simply don't believe we'll see anything like this much change over the next three years. We've laid down the formats and the infrastructure and the devices for the rest of the decade, and after a period of great upheaval we're going to be filling in the blanks. We're going to watch the Wii and the PS3 and HD-ready TVs and Vista and the iPhone and all these other new pieces of the technology puzzle find their place. The economic outlook is darker than it has been for some time. The US is under pressure and no one knows how bad the current panic in the financial system really is. If things do turn sour, the last thing consumers will be doing is taking a punt on new flat-screen televisions and expensive digital music players. I expect the CES show in Las Vegas in January next year to be rather dull, as we see upgrades and new models rather than real change. Every party comes to an end: so it goes. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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