2012: The year that will be remembered for the iPhone 5 finally landing along with its closest smartphone rival the Samsung Galaxy S3, while in the world of tablets Apple responded to the success of the 7-inch Android-powered Nexus 7 tablet with the iPad Mini. We shouldn't also forget about official launches for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Nintendo's next generation console offering the Wii U and then there was plenty of courtroom action as the major tech players fought it out over patents.

2013 promises to be equally as eventful so to prepare you for a raft of new cutting-edge kit and headline-grabbing stories, we've picked out 13 ways tech will rule in the coming year.

You can read all '50 Ways Tech Will Rule 2013' in the latest issue of T3 Magazine available now in newsagents or by downloading the iPad and Android tablet editions.

Xbox 720 vs Sony PS4

The grapevine whispers are gathering volume: E3 in June will give us a look at the “Xbox 720”, as we’re hoping they don’t call it, possibly with an Xmas release to follow. Will Sony get its PS4 retaliation in first, though?

Ouya becomes reality

With 63,417 Kickstarter funders, the open-source, Android-based games console has £5.4 million to play with. Launching in March, it’ll cost just £63, and all games will be free to try. Ouya might just do for indie games devs in the home market what app stores did for them on mobile…

Robot refs rise up

Ref! Over the line! Not one but two systems – GoalRef and HawkEye – were approved by FIFA in 2012 and are already used in Japan. They’re due to end Premier League goal-line controversy in time for the 2013-14 season, giving Alan Shearer and Hansen one less thing to bleat about on Saturday nights…

You will drive the future

Smart Cars will make way for really smart cars as apps break into all of our cars, handling everything from locking to mapping to pimping dashboard instruments via mobile connectivity.

4K will be the new 3D

TV manufacturers have struggled to get people excited about 3D. Will 4K, with a resolution four times greater than 1080p, generate more buzz? With prices still at the “For early-adopting oligarchs only” level, maybe not. But give it a place in the PS4’s spec list – Sony is the prime mover behind 4K and has already helped break CD, DVD and Blu-ray formats via its consoles – and that’ll change. We can’t wait.

Cloud goes heavyweight

iCloud, Dropbox, SkyDrive and Google Drive will take on more and more Petabytes of peoples’ data. Expect media horror stories aplenty about lost data, security breaches and, probably, cloud storage causing cancer.