Gadget-wise, there’s a number of must-haves you need to have for this year. I mean, it’s 2012; the number alone sounds futuristic. Lots of things were meant to have happened by the year 2000, but the planet wasn’t yet ready for them. Now that the internet’s more commonplace, electric cars don’t look like they’ve come out of space and we can do nearly everything with a mobile phone, the limits are pretty much endless for where technology is heading. If you’re playing catch-up, the following are a mere handful of the gadgets you need to get up to modern times.

Smartphone – This might be an obvious one to a lot of people, but a number of others still need to understand the capabilities of Smartphones and just how much of an impact they can make to your everyday life. If it’s just because you might need to access internet on the go, or you find yourself in a sitation which regular phone functions wouldn’t be ale to solve, Smartpones are the way forward.

eReader -You might have noticed CDs taking a huge downward spiral in the past few years, but it looks like books are the next on the list to lose out to their digital counterparts. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that it’s electronic, it’s almost certain that you’ll be able to replace your entire book collection with just one manageable-sized device.

Tablet – These gadgets can be viewed as more portable versions of laptops. Although they’re far smaller and don’t have the sort of memory power of netbooks, tablets have all the functions which you might need when you’re on the move, without clogging the system up with redundant features.

Times are moving quickly, so there’s still no guarantee that all of these will be around by the time the next milestone year (probably 2020) hits, but from the current look of things, the aforementioned are all you need to keep you in the loop for gadgets for the moment. Don’t worry, you still won’t be needing to shell out for 3D TVs and silly glasses just yet.