The future is, if you’ll excuse the comparison, like a filthy fish tank. It is inscrutable, continually in motion, its contents resisting divination by the learned and ignorant alike. Strange things lurk amidst its murky currents, unseen but in swirl and shadow, and there are little wafty bits that could be baby fish or food flakes or possibly pooplets.

OK, the simile falls apart a bit there at the end. But you get the idea. The future is nebulous, with lots of weird stuff floating in it, some good and some bad. Nevertheless Techeye tends to be optimistic about the future, because that’s where new technology comes from.

A case in point: Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 5 this week. What kind of uber-technofangled goodness is it packing? Well, Techeye doesn’t usually prognosticate past our next meal, but once, while camping with friends, we nibbled the wrong kind of cactus and saw visions of an older, sexier Techeye, with sultry love handles and silky back hair, wearing an irresistible, beer-fragranced singlet.

That vision came pass, so we feel comfortable making a few predictions about the iPhone 5. Two things we’ll definitely see are a larger touchscreen and a new dock connector. Possible (meaning occasionally rumored) improvements include a new chip architecture, an upgraded battery and new earphones, replacing the iconic (albeit craptastic) white earbuds that first shipped with the gen-one iPod.

And here’s a couple of things the iPhone 5 really ought to have, but won’t: a pretty, pretty princess sparkle mode and a misplaced-donut detector. Glaring omissions, those.

Anyway, we’ll know what Apple has up its sleeve soon, but here’s something to tide us over until then: the Padcaster (Thepadcaster.com).

What is it? Several things, and pretty ain’t one of them. The Padcaster is “an aluminum frame with a urethane insert that snugly holds your iPad” and transforms it “into an on-the-go production studio.” You can shoot videos, edit them using special software, then upload your masterpieces to YouTube to be mocked by an international audience. The device can also turn an iPad into an on-set monitor, teleprompter, film slate or a portable light source.

In short, the Padcaster lets you make fancy movies in a fancy way. And that’s not all – would-be auteurs can also get the Lenscaster, an accessory that lets you attach a proper SLR lens (not included) to an iPad. Please note that tablets with SLR lenses attached look awfully silly.

Anyway, the Padcaster costs $149 (or $189 when sold with the Lenscaster attachment).

We’ve got some space left in this column, so let’s also look at the Galaxy Note II, which is not to be confused with the Galaxy Note 10.1 despite the fact that Samsung (Samsung.com) gave them confusingly similar names. No, the Galaxy Note II is a “phablet” – a mobile phone verging on the over-large – which claims kinship with the Note 10.1 because both have a stylus.
Compared to its immediate predecessor, the relatively popular Galaxy Note I, Samsung’s newest phone offers modest improvements. The Note II has a 5.5-inch screen (up 0.2 inches on the Note I) but screen resolution is unchanged. The battery is slightly better, you can upgrade your storage to 64 GB (compared to just 16 GB) and there’s a 1.6 GHz quad-core Exynos processor (versus the Note I’s 1.4 GHz).

And how much does the Galaxy Note II cost? For now, that information is lost in the swirling unknowability of the future, amidst a haze of metaphorical fish pooplets.
Or something like that.

Ever come up with and mercilessly over-use a terrible simile? Let us know: techeye.wbj@gmail.com