The year of 2011 is over and now it’s 2012. Last year like many other years was a huge year for consumer electronics and technology. At ZL Studios we wrote thousands of blog posts over the past year covering what has been going on in depth. We’ve written so much that it might be difficult for you to keep track of all that has happened and that’s where this post comes into place. We’ve summarized what happened has happened over the past twelve months relating to technology into this blog post. We’ve included what you guys voted for in our Best Tech Of 2011 polls as well as stuff that we at ZL Studios thought was the most important. It’s all categorized into different sections that correspond to the different categories of posts that we publish.
Categories
Computers
2011 was such a big year due to new smartphones like the Galaxy Nexus and tablets like the iPad 2 but computers are still around and they are definitely here to stay. The usual desktops and notebooks were released with updated processors and components from companies like Intel and AMD, and a new class of computer called the ultrabook came to life in 2011 aimed to compete with the MacBook Air and replace netbooks and notebooks.
Intel Unveils The Ultrabook
Intel must have realized that netbooks just don’t have enough power for the average user and Apple’s netbook the MacBook Air was a slightly better idea. Intel introduced the Ultrabook which is a new class of machine that’s both thin and light while still being fairly powerful. We saw the first Ultrabooks around May of 2011 with the ASUS UX21 but at the time it wasn’t called an Ultrabook. We had to wait until the summer of 2011 until Intel coined the term Ultrabook and we started seeing Ultrabooks from Acer, Lenovo, ASUS, and Toshiba. None of them have really been extremely successful probably due to the price of these machines which is a bit higher than the average Windows notebook.
Entertainment
Last year was a pretty interesting year as far as entertainment goes. We saw the set top box in some ways fail and in some ways succeed. We saw the Apple TV, the Google TV, the Roku, the Boxee Box, and many others and all are bringing the Internet to your HDTV making your HDTV a bit more smart. Services like Spotify, Rdio, Netflix, and Hulu Plus all aimed to bring entertainment to the Internet through a subscription. They may have not quite become mainstream yet but they have grown a whole lot.
Set Top Boxes Continue To Succeed
We really started to see a shift away from cable in 2010 but that shift continued in 2011. We saw more and more set top boxes get released and get software updates. One of the most successful set top boxes was the Apple TV even though it didn’t see any sort of hardware upgrade during 2011. We saw software updates that allowed it to integrate with other Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad more and more. Things like AirPlay allowed iPad owners to use their Apple TV to duplicate what’s on their iPad’s display onto a larger HDTV all without any wires. Other platforms like the Google TV never really succeeded in 2011. The Google TV platform actually hurt Logitech so much that Logitech won’t create a new Google TV anytime soon. But for the most part set top boxes like the Roku, Boxee Box, Google TV, and others did extremely well in 2011 since more and more people are noticing online streaming services like Spotify and Netflix.
Subscription Streaming Services Begin To Rival Cable
Streaming services like Spotify and Netflix didn’t exactly go mainstream in 2011 but they were noticed and they were used by millions of people. Spotify came to the United States for the first time in the summer of 2011 with a huge Facebook partnership. Spotify and Facebook are deeply integrated making music very social. But it also is making music cheaper, you pay just $10 per month and you get unlimited streaming of ever song on Spotify on devices from your desktop computer to your tablet or smartphone. Other services like Rdio and MOG also started to gain more popularity but Spotify was by far the leader when it came to music streaming in 2011. Google also introduced Google Music and Apple brought iCloud and iTunes Match to the world in 2011.
Music isn’t the only thing you can stream through the Internet onto your devices. You can also stream movies and TV shows. Services like Netflix continued to be successful even after Netflix decided to rename Netflix’s streaming service Qwikster. The Qwikster name didn’t stay but now Netflix offers plans that are just streaming or just DVDs or both. There were also other services for streaming media in 2011 like Hulu Plus and Apple and Google have even started to get into the streaming business. Google started allowing users to rent movies on YouTube. Amazon started allowing people to rent movies and stream them online. And Apple brought movie rentals and streaming to the world as well.
Gaming
2011 was a good and bad year for gaming. Motion controllers went mainstream while at the same time mobile gaming went mainstream. Sony and Nintendo still ended up producing handhelds even though the growing smartphone market began to takeover the handheld market. Sony released both a handheld as well as some PlayStation Certified Android devices like the rumored PlayStation Phone now known as the Xperia Play. Sony also had a really bad couple of months when the PlayStation Network got hacked making pretty much all online games like Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 unplayable.
Note: Isiah Thorne contributed to the gaming section.
Motion Gaming Becomes Popular, 3D Gaming Does Not
Motion gaming has been around for a while, ever since the launch of the Nintendo Wii. But just recently motion gaming arrived on both the PlayStation 3 with the PlayStation Move and the Kinect for the Xbox 360. Both platforms really took off during 2011 since many new games have arrived that support both platforms. Microsoft even released a new Xbox Live dashboard version that allows Xbox users to control their Xbox 360 using the Kinect. So overall motion gaming was a success during 2011.
3D gaming was kind of the opposite. We saw 3D gaming really arrive mainly on the PlayStation 3 allowing people who own a 3D HDTV to game in 3D. We also saw a lot of new computer monitors, HDTVs, and graphics cards that support 3D meaning 3D became a little more mainstream. But overall 3D gaming and 3D in general didn’t take off as expected. I personally think the reason for this is because we didn’t really see glasses free 3D.
Sony Announces The PlayStation Vita And Xperia Play For Mobile Gaming
I really liked the Xperia Play when it came out with Android on it as well as a 5MP cmarea, 720p video recording, 1GHz dual-core snapdragon processor and 512MB of RAM. This was not a bad device at all, and Sony really is confident in this device, so much that it is getting an Ice Cream Sandwich update from the current Android 2.3 Gingerbread. So you know this was a success. The Xperia Play also represents mobile gaming becoming a very popular thing, more popular than the mobile handheld gaming systems which used to be popular.
The PS Vita is probably the most anticipated mobile gaming device out there, and it is not even in other countries yet. It is only in Japan and is causing quite a bit of talk. This mobile gaming device has a back touch panel and a front quad-core Cortex A9 processor which makes the device up to date with all the other mobile devices, if not ahead just a little bit. But this is a really good device, and the official launch of the device in other countries in in February.
Nintendo Launches Nintendo 3DS, Announces The Wii U
The Nintendo 3DS was not my favorite mobile gaming device launched this year, but it did bring some 3D gaming experience to the world of mobile gaming. There is not really much to say here, but the fact that this was one of the first devices where you could have no 3D glasses and still have 3D thanks to the 3D display they managed to make. But if you did not want to play in 3D, you could play in 2D by flipping a simple switch.
Nintendo also announced the Wii U which will be their next generation gaming console replacing the Wii. The Wii U will probably arrive some time in 2012. Overall the Wii U is designed as a device to rival the existing PS3 and Xbox 350 as far as the power of the console goes. And as well as the amount of games available to the console, Nintendo has already announced plans to bring a ton of games from companies like EA to the Wii U.
The PlayStation Network Gets Hacked, PlayStation 3 Gamers Can’t Play Online
The PlayStation Network was hacked and it was down a few months, and it was really bad. It caused people to lose their data stored online such as your guns, perks, emblems, titles, ect. unlocked in Call of Duty. The few months that PSN was down made Sony look bad, and people started to talk about them saying that they suck for not being able to prevent this. But really that hacker could probably just as easily hacked Xbox Live.
Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Skrim, And Other Games Arrive
Battlefield 3 brought us the most intense graphics ever seen on a video game. The graphics were extremely high and looked amazing. But the problem is that you had to have a PC to experience that. Consoles could not handle the graphics on the game, especially the Xbox users who had no hard drive. If you had no hard drive, you were basically screwed and could not have high graphics. You were basically playing the first Battlefield game just with different maps and guns. Another problem that occurred was the fact that not everyone could afford a high end graphics card, so people will just play on low everything.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, or MW3 as some people call it for short, was not a high end game, but it did turn some heads as it pulls in some great fun. I currently have played this on Xbox, PS3, and PC and I have to say, no matter what console you are on, it is fun to play the game. Even though you may not have that many new things, you do have a few new things, and a few new guns to try out. This game is probably talked about just as much as Battlefield 3, and is of course, competing with the game for the #1 spot.
Skyrim won the game of the year, so I guess I was forced to put this on here. It was not my favorite game, and I don’t quite like those games where you are in the past, Minecraft of course the exception. But the game does have dragons and I found that interesting. And something else that was interesting is the Notched Pickaxe, which was an Easter egg.
Hardware
2011 was a pretty big year for hardware just like nearly every year is due to Moore’s Law. Intel released both Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E processors while AMD released both FM1 Fusion and AM3+ FX processors to compete with Intel. NVIDIA and AMD released brand new graphics cards aimed to improve PC gaming by powering games like Battlefield 3. Meanwhile new I/O interfaces arrived like Thunderbolt on Macs and USB 3.0 on PCs although neither really have become what they were expected to become.
Intel Introduces Sandy Bridge And Sandy Bridge-E
As expected Intel released their Sandy Bridge processors in very early 2011, but the chips weren’t perfect at launch. A chipset issue delayed the sale of Sandy Bridge processors for little while but Intel quickly fixed the issue and then it didn’t take long for most Windows PCs on the market to have Sandy Bridge processors inside. Sandy Bridge chips were the very first to put integrated graphics right on the chip. Sandy Bridge also brought new LGA 1155 motherboards and chipsets to the market. The Z68 chipset introduced a new technology called Intel Smart Response Technology which allows you to use a smaller SSD to cache and speed up your standard HDD.
Sandy Bridge chips were pretty standard and more for the average consumer. Sandy Bridge-E was a little different, it was for the enthusiast. Sandy Bridge-E chips were introduced in the fall of 2011 and were made to replace the older LGA 1366 chips. Sandy Bridge-E used a new LGA 2011 socket and the chips were really designed for pure performance. The new chips supported things like quad channel memory which was new as well as overclocking and support for multiple graphics cards.
AMD Launches Fusion And FX Series Chips
Intel may be the biggest processor manufacturer but that didn’t stop AMD from releasing their own chips. AMD started out the year with AMD Fusion chips designed to be fairly low power and fairly cheap but powerful chip. There are both notebook and desktop versions of the Fusion chips each are a little different. But both are considered APUs or in other words chips that have both the GPU and CPU inside. Both chips also aimed more to compete with Intel’s lower end Sandy Bridge processors. AMD Fusion chips did get a little bit of the netbook and notebook markets so AMD was successful in doing what they wanted to do with Fusion.
AMD’s FX Series chips were supposed to arrive earlier in 2011 but they actually arrived later in the fall of 2011. As we waited the chips were more and more over-hyped. They were supposed to be quite a bit better than the most high end Intel Sandy Bridge chips but in reality they were somewhat of a disappointment. Yeah they had eight cores which was twice what Intel Sandy Bridge chips have but the benchmarks and actual real world performance of the chips was about the same if not worse than the Intel chips. Plus the chips weren’t as good at overclocking as expected.
USB 3.0 And Thunderbolt Didn’t Go Mainstream
2011 was a pretty bad year when it came to I/O. At first we were supposed to have seen USB 3.0 on more computers but Intel never integrated USB 3.0 into any of their chipsets so not a whole lot of PCs ever go USB 3.0. There were a good number of PCs that did and quite a few motherboards also got USB 3.0 but it didn’t become a universal port found on nearly all computers like it was supposed to. The same sort of thing happened with Intel’s Light Peak or what’s now known as Intel Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt was first put onto quite a few different Macs starting with the MacBook Pro in very early 2011 and now pretty much all Macs have Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is an extremely fast port that can do quite a few different things including power external monitors, USB ports, audio ports, Ethernet, and more all at the same time. Because not many Windows PCs got Thunderbolt the port didn’t really become successful so there weren’t a whole lot of accessories that were able to take advantage of Thunderbolt.
Hard Disk Drive Pricing Rises, Hybrid Hard Drives Are Introduced, SSDs Get Faster
Towards the end of 2011 there were some floods in Thailand where most hard disk drives are manufactured meaning not as many hard drives could be produced causing the cost of hard drives to rise quite a bit. PC prices rose quite a bit and the higher hard drive prices gave SSDs a chance to succeed. That didn’t really happen but we did get some good things out of the more expensive hard drives.
We saw the introduction of hybrid hard drives. Or in other words a standard hard drive but with a smaller SSD built inside to cache the hard drive really speeding it up. So you’re getting the speed of a slower solid state drive and the storage of a smaller hard drive. Plus a cost that’s very similar to the hard drives. The hybrid hard drives didn’t really take off but they were introduced and they are a really good option for people who want both speed and storage without paying a whole lot of money. As time goes on there is a chance that in the future these hybrid drives could succeed.
Solid state drives have been around for a very long time but in 2011 the prices continued to get lower and the performance continued to get better. Since SATA 6Gbps took off new solid state drives that could use the faster SATA port started to arrive. Bringing extremely fast speeds of around 500Mbps read and write speeds. The prices for these drives also weren’t too bad for those wanting the really great performance. A 64GB SSD costed around $100 and a 128GB SSD costed around $200 and the prices and capacities were at that rate of about $100 for every 64GB.
Legal
Innovation usually doesn’t happen without any resistance, and 2011 was no exception. Apple continued to go after companies like Samsung and HTC for making Android devices that are in some ways similar to the Apple iPad and the Apple iPhone. For the most part these lawsuits haven’t gone anywhere and the same applies to AT&T-Mobile. AT&T announced plans to purchase T-Mobile at the beginning of 2011 but recently AT&T gave up on the deal. Not all acquisitions failed however, Google decided to purchase Motorola. We also saw a pretty interesting bill called SOPA in congress that aimed to stop online piracy and in the process possibly make the Internet not so stable, the bill’s fate has yet to be decided.
AT&T Attempts To Acquire T-Mobile
This story has to be one of the biggest ones of 2011. In March AT&T made an announcement saying that they planned to acquire T-Mobile for $39 billion and they planned to have the deal all worked out some time during early 2012. But as time went on it became obvious that AT&T would have to work pretty hard to get T-Mobile since the FCC didn’t really like the idea of the merger and the same applied to the competition like Sprint. But there were all kinds of reports that AT&T would do some crazy things to get T-Mobile, like sell part of T-Mobile to other carriers and do those sorts of things. But towards the end of the year AT&T ended up announcing the cancellation of the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. In the process AT&T had to pay T-Mobile’s parent company $4 billion. AT&T also announced a seven year roaming deal with T-Mobile after they cancelled the merger. The deal isn’t very significant right now but in the future T-Mobile and AT&T could be pretty big partners sharing both LTE and 3G networks to compete with bigger carriers like Verizon.
Apple Sues Android OEMs
For the most part we didn’t cover this on ZL Studios a whole lot since overall it seems like just the same thing over and over again. Apple has the iPhone and iPad, Samsung has the Galaxy S and the Galaxy Tab. Apple sues Samsung since the devices are similar in different ways. Samsung doesn’t like what Apple did so Samsung sues Apple. Then Apple fights back and bans Samsung devices in countries like Germany and Australia. The countries are different and the OEMs are different at times but overall Apple has been fighting with other companies through the entire year. For the most part we don’t cover this battle in depth since it’s fairly meaningless and neither Apple or the competition has really gotten anywhere by suing back and forth. These companies probably are just bored and have plenty of money laying around that the can spend on constant lawsuits.
Google Acquires Motorola Mobility
The AT&T and T-Mobile merger wasn’t very successful and most people weren’t too happy with the idea. The Google and Motorola Mobility merger was the opposite. In August Google announced their plans to acquire Motorola Mobility from Motorola for $12.5 billion. At first you’d think that the merger would really hurt the competition since Motorola would have probably gotten special treatment from Google when it came to making Android phones. But Google quickly clarified and announced that it wouldn’t change how they treat Motorola and that the idea of a Nexus device won’t change. Which is good news, HTC, Samsung, and other Android phone OEMs have overall be fine with this merger and the same applies with the shareholders of Motorola. This merger hasn’t been completed quite yet but unlike the AT&T and T-Mobile merger the Google and Motorola one will probably pass without any major issues.
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Is Introduced In Congress
A very interesting but not unexpected thing happened in 2011 relating to the entertainment industry and the Internet. As you know the entertainment industry has been hurt because the Internet exists. The Internet makes pirating movies, music and other things much easier. And that’s why there was the DMCA which allows the entertainment industry to file a complaint to get some content taken off of the Internet if it infringes copyright. The DMCA has worked and it’s done all that you could really do to stop piracy online. But SOPA was introduced to allow the entertainment industry and the government to have a whole lot more control over the Internet. Meaning that either group could block an entire website from the Internet if they wanted to. Although the website would still be there, you’d just have to type in the IP address. Meaning the bill wouldn’t stop piracy but instead it would prevent websites from growing and it would really hurt the Internet as a whole which is now a bigger industry than the entertainment industry. The bill still hasn’t been voted on but overall the Internet hates the idea of this bill, the entertainment industry knows what damage the bill can do so they want it to pass, and congress just doesn’t really know enough about the Internet and the entertainment industry to actually vote on the bill, so they’ll vote in early 2012.
Net Neutrality Bills Don’t Get Out Of Congress
This is both a 2010 and 2011 story since it started in 2010 but it was finished in 2011. Basically there is this thing called net neutrality which basically aims to make the Internet very fair and equal. Meaning that you can have access to an unfiltered Internet connection. And that ISPs have to be transparent, and that they can’t block any lawful websites or services. And that ISPs can’t really do any prioritization in any way, meaning if Google pays an ISP a billion dollars they can’t make Google load way faster than any other website. Overall in my opinion net neutrality seemed like a good idea but the United States government didn’t really like the idea. Congress and the FCC both ended up blocking all of the net neutrality bills. Right now this isn’t a bad thing but in the future as ISPs make less money off of Cable TV subscriptions they might have to charge you extra for using services like Netflix or completely block Netflix or make it extremely slow. And instead maybe sell their very own version of Netflix that costs a whole lot more but isn’t blocked and is extremely fast. None of that has happened yet so hopefully it will stay that way.
People
One of last year’s biggest stories was the death of one of Apple’s founders and at the time CEO, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs passed away on October 5th being just 56 years old. Tim Cook succeeds him at Apple as the CEO and the biography of Steve Jobs was released to the world. But Apple was the only the company who got a new CEO in 2011. HP changed CEOs once more this time they changed to Meg Whitman, and Google changed CEOs from Eric Schmidt to Larry Page. Meanwhile CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg continued to make companies like Facebook successful.
Apple’s Founder And Former CEO Steve Jobs Passes Away
This was actually one of the biggest stories of 2011. One of the most popular CEOs in the world Steve Jobs founded Apple with a couple of friends and he was the CEO of the company ever since. He helped Apple introduce the iPod, iPhone, the iPad, and he made the Mac both easy to use and beautiful yet at the same time functional. He revolutionized computers, music, smartphones, and tablets. So Steve Jobs was a very revolutionary man and he passed away on October 5th, 2011. At the time he was only 56 years old. Cancer was the cause of his early death, he worked as the CEO of Apple all the way up until he died, right before he passed away he announced that Tim Cook was the new CEO of Apple. Tim Cook of course was the guy who lead Apple while Steve Jobs was gone for a little while on medical leave.
HP Changes CEOs Once More, Meg Whitman Becomes The New CEO
HP is a good company, they are the leader when it comes to making personal computers and they sure make a lot of money off of PCs. But they’ve done a lot of weird things over the past few years and part of this might be because of their CEOs. They actually changed CEOs twice over the past couple of years which is pretty unusual for a company and especially a big company like HP. Think about it, Steve Jobs was the CEO of Apple for decades. But HP ended up replacing their former CEO Leo Apotheker with Meg Whitman in 2011. Apotheker was only HP’s CEO for a few months before he was was replaced by Meg Whitman.
Google Chances CEOs From Eric Schmidt To Their Founder, Larry Page
Eric Schmidt has led Google for quite a long time. Google was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 but not long after that Eric Schmidt took over as the older and more experienced CEO of Google and he did a real great job with Android, Google search, and all of the Google services that are on the Internet today. But in 2011 Eric Schmidt was replaced by one of Google’s founders Larry Page. Larry Page became the CEO this year and Eric Schmidt stepped down to the Executive Chairman position. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, an Sergey Brin all plan to work at Google at least until 2024.
Smartphones
Smartphones have been around for a while and modern smartphones have now been around for a few years but that isn’t slowing down innovation when it comes to smartphones. We saw platforms like iOS and Android continue to grow while webOS and BlackBerry OS have really started to disappear. And while all that was going on Microsoft was working extremely hard to get Windows Phone out there to compete with iOS and Android. iPhone 4S, Galaxy Nexus, Nokia Lumia 800, it all happened in 2011. We also saw the rise of a technology called LTE which Verizon started towards the end of 2010. Verizon still remains the leader of this new technology making data speeds on smartphones extremely fast.
Google Introduces The Galaxy Nexus With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
Google ended the year very well with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus which is basically Google’s latest Nexus phone bringing giant HD displays along with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to the market. The Galaxy Nexus arrived on Verizon’s network on December 15th for $300 on a two year contract. The phone has a larger 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED display at a 1280×720 resolution. The phone itself is powered by a dual core 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and the phone also has 32GB of storage and supports LTE. The phone has it all including Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich which is Google’s latest version of Android. It has lots of new features and overall it looks great, is easy to use, and is extremely powerful and fast. There are many new features with the new version of Android.
Verizon Leads The Android Army With HTC And Motorola Phones
Verizon is the biggest carrier in the United States and they sure got pretty much all of the best Android phones this year. They got the HTC Rezound which is a nice smartphone that brings Beats Audio to the phone along with a 1.5GHz dual core processor, a 4.3-inch HD display at a 1280×720 resolution, 1GB of RAM, and LTE. The bad thing about the Rezound is the fact that it doesn’t yet have Ice Cream Sandwich and instead has Gingerbread with Sense 3.5. Motorola also introduced the Droid RAZR with a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, 1GB of RAM, a 1.2GHz dual core processor, and an extremely thin design. The design is the best thing about the Rezound since it’s both thin and light but also extremely strong since it has Gorilla Glass and Kevlar. Other carriers got great Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy S II Skyrocket with large displays, LTE on AT&T, and a nice large display. The Galaxy S II has to be one of the best non Galaxy Nexus smartphones on the market today and one good thing about it is the fact that it’s on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint.
Apple Introduces The iPhone 4S With iOS 5
Apple introduced the long awaited Apple iPhone 4S which sadly wasn’t the all new redesigned iPhone 5 but I guess you can’t always trust all of the rumors that go around. Even without the redesign the iPhone 4S is a great phone with a dual core 1GHz Apple A5 processor, the same 3.5-inch Retina Display, dual cameras including an 8MP rear camera, 512MB of RAM, up to 64GB of storage, and even support for multiple carriers. The iPhone 4S supports AT&T, Verizon, and now Sprint. The phone comes in just one model that will work on your choice of a carrier. The phone also comes with Apple’s latest version of iOS which is now iOS 5. The new version of iOS brings a lot of new things like Siri voice commands, a new and improved notification center, AirPlay mirroring, iCloud, and more.
Nokia And Microsoft Work Together To Produce Windows Phones
Nokia announced something called “Rollling Thunder” and that’s basically their plan to come back into the United States. They are doing this because of a recent partnership with Microsoft who develops Windows Phone 7. Windows Phone 7 didn’t actually take off during 2011 like Microsoft wanted but from what we are hearing they are really going to work hard to become big in 2012. Microsoft should release two versions of Windows Phone during 2012 and the operating system should power devices from Samsung, HTC, LG, and of course Nokia.
Nokia should start this all off by launching a Lumia 800 in the United States that supports LTE on Verizon and AT&T as well as a cheaper 710 on T-Mobile. Then we should possibly see even more high end Windows Phones like the Nokia Lumia 900 in the future as well. So really Windows Phone didn’t go mainstream during 2011, but Microsoft sure did plan a good future.
HP Releases A Couple Of webOS Phones And Then Gives Up
As you might know HP purchased Palm a couple of years ago in 2010 and then they released some devices like the HP Pre 2 and HP Pre 3 in the United States as well as the HP Veer. Not all of these phones actually arrived on carriers in the United States but HP did release them. Then eventually decided to give up on webOS and Palm towards the end of the year. They stopped producing webOS phones and they don’t plan to produce an phones in the future. But they do plan to release tablets and they did make webOS open source meaning that there is a future for webOS, just not on HP powered phones.
4G LTE Goes Mainstream, Verizon Is Still The Leader
One of the biggest things that happened in 2011 related to the cell networks. Verizon started their 4G LTE network towards the very end of 2010 but then in 2011 they really made 4G LTE a big thing. They expanded their 4G LTE network to cover a total of 190 cities that covered 200 million Americans by the end of 2011 making their LTE network the largest by far. AT&T’s network only covered around 15 cities by the end of 2011. AT&T also didn’t have a whole lot of different smartphones while Verizon had quite a few. Verizon launched quite a few high end 4G LTE Android phones like the Galaxy Nexus, HTC Rezound, Droid RAZR, and the Droid Bionic. As well as some LTE tablets like the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and Droid Xyboard 10.1 and 8.2. So 4G LTE really did go mainstream during 2011. 200 million Americans is a whole lot and from the looks of it Verizon plans to have every phone they release in the future support LTE. And chances are both Sprint and AT&T are planning to have similar plans in the future as well.
Carrier IQ Becomes A Universal Issue With Smartphones
Carrier IQ became a very big issue towards the end of 2011. It was discovered on an HTC Evo 3D and a video was posted on the Internet of what exactly Carrier IQ is and what it does. And basically Carrier IQ allows both the carrier and the OEM to get some data on what you do with your smartphone. It logs the keys you type on your keyboard, the pictures you take, the calls you make, and really everything relating to what you do on your smartphone. Carrier IQ is found on millions of phones on devices like the iPhone and many Android and BlackBerry phones on many of the different carriers across the world. So Carrier IQ is a very universal issue and hopefully soon there will be a way for smartphone users to either turn on or turn off Carrier IQ on their phones.
Tablets
Yes tablets were around in 2010 but they were nothing compared to what they were in 2011, you could say tablets went mainstream. A lot of the same people making both smartphone software and hardware worked to get into the tablet market. We saw the successor to the iPad called the iPad 2 with iOS and we saw the very first actual Android tablets running Android 3.0 Honeycomb like the Motorola Xoom. Android wasn’t the only new tablet platform in 2011, we also saw the HP TouchPad running webOS, the BlackBerry PlayBook running QNX, and then the Kindle Fire running a highly modified version of Android. Many tablets were complete failures while others have done extremely well.
Google Introduces Android 3.0 Honeycomb With The Motorola Xoom
Google finally got into the tablet market by launching Android 3.0 Honeycomb at CES 2012 on only the Motorola Xoom at the time. The Xoom was in a way Google’s Nexus tablet even though Google didn’t market the tablet like they do with Nexus phones. The Xoom was the very first actual Android tablet and it arrived this year, it wasn’t the best Android tablet of the year and it was actually somewhat expensive, thick, and not really the best tablet when compared to tablets like the iPad 2, Galaxy Tab 10.1, and Transformer Prime but it was the very first Android tablet on the market. So even though the Xoom wasn’t the best it was still extremely significant for Google and for Android since it gave Apple some competition in the tablet market.
Samsung, HTC, ASUS Acer, And Others Release Android Tablets
The Motorola Xoom was the very first Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet and it wasn’t a very good tablet when compared to other Android tablets. The best Android tablet of the year had to be the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime which arrived towards the end of the year. The Transformer Prime marks the next generation of Android tablets with quad core processors. ASUS also launched the first generation Transformer with a dual core Tegra 2 processor like pretty much all Android tablets. We also saw the Galaxy Tab 10.1 as well as smaller tablets like the Galaxy Tab 8.9, and Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. All ran a version of Android 3.0 Honeycomb and all had good things and bad things about them.
Apple Introduces The iPad 2
Apple really was the first company to release a tablet with the Apple iPad which arrived in 2010. Then a year later last year they released the Apple iPad 2 which was the successor to the really successful iPad. The iPad 2 was more powerful with a dual core Apple A5 processor, it was much thinner and lighter, and it had dual cameras. Making it a much better tablet and it really made the very first Android tablets like the Motorola Xoom seem like year old devices. But now Android tablets are very comparable to the Apple iPad 2. We’ll just have to see if things stay that way when Apple launches the next iPad later this year.
HP Releases The HP TouchPad, Sells It For $100, Then Gives Up
HP launched their very own tablet the HP TouchPad. Like many other tablets it didn’t do so well at first. It was like the BlackBerry PlayBook, it was the same price as the other tablets but it just wasn’t very comparable. The software platform wasn’t very mature and the hardware wasn’t perfect. HP noticed that and really they decided to give up on webOS just a few weeks after the launch of the HP TouchPad. They ended up selling the HP TouchPad for just $100 making it sell extremely well. This kind of showed the world that a $100 tablet or in other words a cheap tablet will sell well even if the tablet isn’t the best. The HP TouchPad was discontinued even though HP might release new tablets in the future. HP also made webOS open source.
Cheap Android Tablets From Barnes & Noble And Amazon Succeed
We saw the original Nook Color in 2010 as kind of a cheap tablet or expensive e-reader. It was a pretty nice device that sold fairly well. In 2011 cheap tablets really took off starting with the Amazon Kindle Fire which costs $200. The Kindle Fire is a very nice 7-inch tablet that has similar specs to other tablets on the market. It ran a skinned and modified version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread that really has all of the Amazon services integrated into it and all of the Google services removed. The Fire has sold really well probably because of the really low $200 price. The Nook Tablet also sold really well. The Nook Tablet is just like the Kindle Fire but from Barnes And Noble instead of Amazon. The Nook Tablet is a little more open and a little more Android than the Kindle Fire since it allows sideloading Android apps. The Nook Tablet costs $250.
Microsoft Shows Off The Windows 8 Developer Preview
Microsoft really didn’t have any luck in the tablet market. There were plenty of Windows 7 tablets but we’ve seen Windows tablets for a very long time. And when it comes down to it Windows isn’t for tablets and instead it’s for computers with a mouse and a keyboard. So there just isn’t a real big chance for Microsoft to get into the tablet market with just Windows 7. So Microsoft announced Windows 8 which is a more tablet friendly version of Windows to replace Windows 7. It uses the same Metro UI found on the Xbox 360 as well as Windows Phone 7. Microsoft just released the Developer Preview, showed it of on PCs, as well as tablets and gave us a little information on it. We’ll see how Windows 8 is in 2012 when it is actually released onto computers.
Best Tech Of 2011
During the month of December we held a poll called the Best Tech Of 2011 poll. The poll was basically a way for you the readers of ZL Studios to vote on what your favorite gadgets of the year were. It was a pretty simple poll that you could vote on and we got plenty of votes over the month that gave us a good idea of what’s popular and that’s not in various different categories from smartphones and tablets to processors and graphics cards. As we said when we announced the polls we’d post the results on ZL Studios on January 1st, 2012. And that day has come. A lot of what happened was expected but some odd things happened like the iPhone 4S was both the best smartphone and the biggest failure. I guess there was just a lot of hype for an iPhone 5 and that didn’t happen. It was also weird that the best mobile operating system is Android even though the best phone and tablet are Apple iOS devices. I guess this just shows that we had a really wide variety of people voting for different things.
- Smartphones – iPhone 4S
- Graphics Cards – AMD Radeon HD 6990
- Tablets – iPad 2
- Mobile Operating Systems – Android
- E-Readers – Kindle Fire
- Processors – Intel Core i7-2700K
- Video Games – Minecraft
- Notebooks – 15-Inch MacBook Pro
- Desktops – Custom Built Desktop
- HDTVs – Vizio XVT3SV
- Cameras – Canon EOS Rebel T3i
- Consoles – Xbox 360
- Companies – Google
- CEOs – Steve Jobs
- Failures – iPhone 4S
- Technologies – HTML 5
- Carriers – Verizon
- Set Top Boxes – Apple TV
- Operating Systems – Windows 7
Summary
As this over 7,000 word summary of the year 2011 when it comes to consumer electronics and gadgets suggests 2011 was a huge year for technology. We had a really hard time putting together this summary that includes pretty much all of the biggest stories while leaving out all that doesn’t really matter. An even harder thing to do is summarize what happened in a sentence or even a paragraph. But here it goes, 2011 was the year when tablets and smartphones really started to get market share from computers because of online subscription services and much faster internet connections because of things like 4G LTE. And of course there has been a whole lot of resistance from the entertainment industry because of that and the legal part of 2011 will probably continue well into 2012 and maybe even into 2013. So keep on reading ZL Studios since we’ll cover whatever is coming next when it comes to technology.
