The Verge Year in Review

RIM in turmoil

2011 was the year that reality caught up with RIM — or at least it was the year that its investors and customers finally began to notice. How did the company come to this pass? Many blame the two co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Laziridis, who are awaiting word from a so-called "independent committee" on whether their unique management structure can survive. Strange missteps like not fully vetting the trademark for their original name for BlackBerry 10 (BBX) and apparently the same on BBM have added to the distrust.

While RIM has seen success in emerging markets like Indonesia and Latin America, its offerings in 2011 were either flops (the PlayBook) or evolutions on previous BlackBerry products instead of the revolutionary change the company needed to stay competitive. After coasting for years on the strength of its enterprise lead and BBM-loving customers, Android and iOS combined to take the wind out of RIM's sails and really hurt its marketshare in the US. Meanwhile, bad decisions made in years past began to haunt the company — the PlayBook launched to anemic sales at best and its next-gen computing platform is more than half a year away from launching on phones. Until very recently, RIM refused to publicly acknowledge that it had fallen behind — the question now is whether it's too late for the company to catch up.

Rise of the tablet

The trickle of tablets began in 2010 with the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, but in 2011 the floodgates opened. The Motorola Xoom headlined the dozens upon dozens of tablets announced at CES in January — it was the first tablet running Android 3.0, the first version of Android designed with tablets in mind. It may have been a "crash landing" for Google that didn't quite live up to expectation, but it was still an improvement on previous phone-optimized versions. No sooner had we gotten used to the Xoom, though, than the BlackBerry PlayBook broke cover (not that anyone really cared). Then it was the Acer Iconia Tab, the ViewSonic ViewPad, the MSI WindPad, the Kno, the eFun NextBook, and literally countless others. And that was all before January 15th.

The torrent barely slowed over the next 11 and a half months, though the quality increased considerably — the iPad 2 continued Apple's reign at the top of the tablet world, the HP TouchPad debuted with great promise (but a tragic saga), and the Galaxy Tab's lineup of successors stepped up Samsung's game too. Then came the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet, two devices that suggest the cost of good tablets may be dropping considerably from the $500 price set by the iPad. There's still no flagship iPad alternative, (the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime may be the closest thing we've seen yet), but that could change: as we head into 2012's CES, we're expecting a deluge of tablets that should be bigger, better, and a lot more affordable than this year's.

LTE goes mainstream

Following launches in 2010 by MetroPCS and Verizon, LTE really took off this year. Verizon's 4G network now covers over 200 million people and is on its way to a 100 percent CDMA overlay in 2013. As a result, AT&T has been spurred into an aggressive rollout of its own. While new wireless networks almost always launch exclusively in modems designed for road warriors and tech diehards, Verizon went mainstream rapidly: most of the carrier's top-tier smartphones now support LTE out of the box.

Microsoft buys Skype

Microsoft's $8.5 billion all-cash acquisition of Skype from an investment firm, announced in May of this year, represented the single biggest purchase in Redmond's history — a blockbuster deal by any measure, undoubtedly driven up by the wide variety of big companies for which Skype would've probably made a good fit (Facebook and Google, just to name a couple).

Given Skype's dominance in the VoIP space, it's easy to see why a company like Microsoft might've taken a keen interest in it — tight integration with both Windows and Xbox is an inevitability, and it instantly buys the company one of the largest voice footprints in the world outside of the traditional telecom providers. And more than anything, all eyes are on the mobile division to see exactly how deeply Skype gets weaved into Windows Phone next year.

Apps and content

The release of what would be the holy grail for many iOS users, a fully functional Gmail app to compete with Android's, turned out to be one of the year's biggest duds — even excluding the botched launch — and Gmail for iPhone and iPad still doesn't have multiple account support. Otherwise, mobile continued to mature this year: Flipboard, finally on iPhone, helps make sense of your news and various social networks, while Instagram's success suggests that you don't have to recreate a new all-encompassing Google+ or Facebook-style service to build a sizable, and rabid, userbase. Twitter snatched up TweetDeck, and there simply hasn't been much innovation in the client space since Twitter limited third-party developers in March. While cable cutting isn't a reality yet, new TV apps from Comcast, Time Warner, HBO, and ESPN popped up to move your cable subscription from just your TV to your devices.

And then there was Netflix. Following a stratospheric rise over the past several years, the poster child for Blockbuster's downfall finally stumbled. Reed Hastings' company continued shifting through new redesigns across its web, game console, and mobile device presences, and emerged from the impossible-to-spell Qwikster debacle — a proposed spinoff to handle the DVD-by-mail service — to announce a future Arrested Development season for 2013.

Android 4.0

Although it's been on devices since 2008, Android "grew up" this year with the announcement and release of Android 4.0 — better known to many by its confectionery name, Ice Cream Sandwich. It's an important milestone for Andy Rubin's team at Google for many reasons: it seeks to unify the phone / tablet schism caused by Honeycomb, it represents the platform's first major UI overhaul, and it's the first version of Android with heavy influence from design guru Matias Duarte — the guiding force behind webOS's unique design and a former teammate of Rubin's at Danger.

Samsung versus Apple

Apple set off a billion-dollar game of international chess in April when it sued Samsung — one of its biggest suppliers — for "slavishly copying" the design and functionality of the iPhone and iPad. The original suit was filed in the US, but Samsung quickly countered by going international, filing responses in courts around the world and accusing Apple of infringing a host of patents on wireless standards and technologies. (Samsung also demanded to see the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 at one point, but the judge shot that idea down.) Nothing's settled yet, but Apple's so far forced Samsung to alter the design of the Galaxy Tab 10.1N and make changes to the functionality of its software to keep products on the market, and 2012 promises even more fireworks between these two giants of mobile.

The $99 TouchPad phenomenon

While HP's slow, meditated murder of webOS was painful for everybody watching, there was one great thing that came out of it: $99 TouchPads. In a bid to offload inventory of a futureless (and already relatively unsuccessful) product, HP slashed the price of its once flagship tablet. What was a middling product at its original $499 was an absolute steal at $99 a few weeks later, and every retailer that participated was inundated with orders (many of them eventually canceled, as HP ran out of inventory).

The sale was so popular that HP decided to fire up the production line again for one last run to meet the demand. It was an odd gesture, given HP's eventual abandonment of webOS, committing the code to open source. What did come out of it was an excellent piece of ubiquitous hardware for the hacker community to play with, and perhaps a launching board for whoever takes on the webOS project in the years to come.

Enter the Ultrabook

This was the year Intel finally accepted that netbooks were killed by the tablet (okay, maybe it was a secret admission), but Chipzilla also decided that what people really wanted was thin, light, affordable, and solid-performing laptops. Intel's idea of the ultrabook was introduced back in June and in the early fall we saw the first wave of the ultrathin laptops from Acer, Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba. None of them were able to take on the MacBook Air with the right balance of design and pricing, but they certainly set a new bar in terms of speed and battery life for Windows laptops.

Steve Jobs: 1955 - 2011

One of the biggest stories of 2011 was sadly one of loss: Apple CEO Steve Jobs passed away in October after a long battle with cancer. He left behind a legacy of revolutionary devices like the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and MacBook Air, and a company that ranks among the most successful and best-managed ever to exist. He also left behind an authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, which revealed a side of Jobs most had never seen — a man who doted on his family and took vacations to Hawaii. The book has come under justifiable criticism for skimming over large parts of Apple and Jobs' stories, but ultimately it stands as the final record of a remarkable life.

In true Jobs fashion, however, that record may yet have some surprises left: Jobs made one last appearance on the Apple keynote stage to introduce iCloud, which he called the culmination of a ten-year journey to "get rid of the file system." He also told Isaacson that he'd finally "cracked" the solution to reinventing the TV — setting the stage for Jobs to reinvent one last market even after he's gone.

The consumer electronics industry, not unlike every other industry, is rife with terrible products. Most of those, however, we expect to be bad. Then there are the disappointments, a smaller set in the group of bad products. These are the letdowns, the products whose hype was loud and at times felt like it might end up being deserved — usually from larger companies who should know better. We expected a lot more from each and every one of you this year.

The BlackBerry PlayBook

There are plenty of disappointments to choose from when it comes to RIM's performance in 2011, but most of them can probably be summed up with the BlackBerry PlayBook. RIM's bullheaded refusal to recognize its dire situation was most apparent in that bellwether device. Boring hardware, unfinished software, a muddled OS development story, an even more muddle third-party development story, and above all a lack of sales all added up to a perfect storm of missed opportunities for the PlayBook. The tablet didn't even launch with an email client, RIM's core strength, and its future development as the base operating system for all upcoming RIM products is not clear at all. Even the name of the OS — first the PlayBook OS based on QNX, then BBX, then BlackBerry 10 (at some point in the future) — wasn't fully thought through. It's no understatement to say that the lackluster PlayBook reception seriously damaged the company's image. While there are still BlackBerry fanatics clutching their QWERTY keyboards tightly, it's with an air of schadenfreude instead of elitism — the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Android 3.0

With version 3.0, Android was supposed to become a major player in the tablet world. The operating system was redesigned to work on larger screens, and many of the critical apps like Gmail and the browser were overhauled as well. But Honeycomb proved to be buggy and laggy, and in places just seemed unfinished. Even more troubling was the fact that the developer community didn't exactly leap to build apps for Honeycomb tablets — lack of good third-party apps that look good on a larger screen continues to be one of the biggest problems Android slates face. Even with a ton of hardware options, from the Xoom to the Galaxy Tab, no Honeycomb tablet ever posed a real threat to the iPad's supremacy. Almost as soon as Honeycomb was released, rumors of the next version began to surface: Ice Cream Sandwich would be the Android version to finally unite the different screen sizes on a single operating system, and bring Android tablets to maturity. We're still waiting on that, but it looks like the best-case scenario for Honeycomb is that it turns out to be the Windows Vista of Android — an unfortunate stopgap while a better version is finished.

AMD can't find its footing

Advanced Micro Devices was poised to have its best year ever, or so it seemed, as the company mashed its CPU and GPU expertise into the AMD Fusion chips, and appeared poised to launch a raft of desirable netbook alternatives capable of smooth HD video playback and basic gaming at a low price point. That's when just about everything that could go wrong, did. Apple's iPad ignited a tablet fervor that poached the low end of the laptop market, and Intel's Sandy Bridge chips took the rest, making their way into the MacBook Air and starting an ultrabook initative that further threatens to push AMD off the map. Worse, the company's Bulldozer desktop architecture fell flat, failing to deliver the performance increases that were promised, particularly in single-threaded applications. The result? A lot of soul-searching, which included cutting 1,400 jobs, rebranding DDR3 memory, and public admission from AMD that it can't compete with Intel anymore. It's not all bad news, though: the former ATI team still puts out some pretty decent graphics cards.

Thunderbolt lacks thunder

If you had hoped that 2011 would herald the year when we would finally see a single port for everything you plug into your computer, we're sad to report that it wasn't even close to happening. While Thunderbolt launched on Macs and a smattering of PCs, the new standard still has yet to gain industry-wide acceptance — even though affordable-looking docks have been demonstrated — and our periperhals are still a mix of USB, DisplayPort, and others. Intel will try to make another go of it in 2012, but you should still plan on having a full row of disparate ports on your computer for the foreseeable future.

Nikon 1: big hype, big letdown

Small, mirrorless cameras with interchangeable lenses are quickly taking their place among our favorite shooters, so we were excited when Nikon debuted the 1 Series. They're small, beautiful, have multiple lenses, and had great promise coming from the camera goliath. But in practice we found that the J1 has too small a sensor, too few lenses, too little manual control, and too many performance issues — all for a too-high $649 price. The higher-end V1 solves a few of the J1's problems but for an even higher price tag and still without overcoming the poor image quality. With Micro Four Thirds cameras from Olympus and Panasonic catching on fast, and the Sony NEX series becoming a more mature and impressive line of cameras, Nikon missed the mark in a big way. We've long looked to Nikon and Canon to set the standard for nearly every category of digital camera, which makes this blunder all the more surprising and painful.

HP never gives webOS a chance

"Will they or won't they sell?" That was the billion-dollar question on everyone's mind for much of 2011 after then-CEO Leo Apotheker announced that HP's webOS business was effectively being put on ice — a move met with resounding unpopularity, particularly considering that the company had acquired Palm for $1.2 billion just over a year prior. For an international corporation of HP's size, giving up on a promising, meticulously-designed mobile platform that easily simply didn't seem right.

HP's board, it turns out, agreed that Apotheker wasn't making the right calls. Fast forward several months; Apotheker has been dismissed after just a few months on the job, replaced by ex-eBay chief Meg Whitman. Though webOS's ultimate fate as a viable tablet and phone platform for the masses remains murky at best, the company is attempting a compromise: the code is being open-sourced, with HP promising significant investment of its own over the next several years. It sounds eerily similar to Nokia's decision to spin off the ill-fated Symbian platform into the Symbian Foundation in 2008 — but for an operating system on life support and a parent company unwilling or unable to sink the billions of dollars necessary to give it a proper shot, it might be the best solution available.

The MacBook Air gets serious

It might seem odd to call the 2011 MacBook Air a "product of the year," as the svelte laptop has been with us in one form or another since 2008, but this was the year that it morphed from an underpowered thin-and-light machine into the everyman's fully-fledged portable computer. Apple only added a handful of things to last year's razor-thin aluminum unibody frame, but they made a meaningful difference without bumping up the price at all. Core i5 / i7 Sandy Bridge processors more than double the performance, the backlit keyboard makes the ultraportable viable in the dark, and a Thunderbolt port hints at the promise of fancy external expandability over the months to come (but not yet: see Disappointments of the Year above). Sure, we'd still like a matte screen and a dedicated graphics chip, but starting at $999 for the 11-inch model, you won't find a more desirable blend of portability, build quality and performance for the price in any Windows laptop out there. Just ask any of the manufacturers feverishly working on "ultrabooks" right now.

LTE spoils us

Blazing download speeds (we've seen them as high as 60Mbps) and latencies that rival wired broadband: this is the future, and thanks to LTE, it's here today. In fact, Verizon has pushed LTE so aggressively — both through market deployments and compatible smartphones like the Thunderbolt, Droid Charge, Droid Bionic, and Droid RAZR — that for many users it's already starting to become an expectation. Three years ago, did anyone think we'd already be calling EV-DO and HSPA "glacial"?

Sony NEX-5N

The door that Sony cracked open with the NEX-5 has been blown wide open by the NEX-5N. Besides making the body marginally thinner and adding a touchscreen, Sony endowed the NEX-5N with a truly supreme image sensor. Its 16-megapixel CMOS sensor competes with the Nikon D7000 and Canon 60D (each company's latest and greatest midrange DSLR) for noise performance, while delivering image quality that leaves other mirrorless cameras in the dust. If the NEX-5N had a universal microphone input and a more generous battery, it'd be a formidable DSLR replacement for professionals as well. As it stands, it's the top choice for any hobbyist looking for the best image-quality-to-camera-size ratio.

Kindle catches Fire

Amazon took a dramatically different approach to the tablet market in 2011: instead of trying to compete head-on with the iPad, the company focused on content delivery and consumption with its $199 Kindle Fire, which runs a heavily-modified version of Android. The low price and tight integration with Amazon's services have already made the Fire a hit, even though the overall experience is a little rough around the edges. And how will Amazon manage what is effectively a second version of Android, free of Google's influence or control? We'll find out in 2012.

The iPhone 4S, Siri, and voice control

While this year's slight refresh of the iPhone was predictable, that was exactly the problem: it was predictable. The hardware improvements Apple made to the iPhone 4S turned few heads, but one piece of software stood out: Siri. The app, a voice-controlled "personal assistant," was more notable for the future it promised, than the actual reality it delivered. Its list of commands are mostly limited to communication and calendaring features right now, with its question-answering and problem-solving aspects falling a little flat. Still, Siri's comprehension of natural speech is a real leap forward, and there's a foundation here for Apple (and hopefully other developers) to extend Siri and make it truly as intelligent as it sounds. Or you could just keep asking it personal questions and see how far you get.

Of course, Apple isn't the only one working on this: Google's voice recognition on Android is getting better and better, and it's more deeply embedded in the operating system than Siri, while Microsoft is heavily emphasizing the voice-control features of Kinect, especially for the sit-back entertainment aspects of the Xbox 360. If the last decade was marked by the emergence of touch gestures and motion control, the next few years might be when voice control and natural language recognition really take off.

Kinect: motion control is here to stay

Yes, Microsoft's Kinect is technically a 2010 product. And yes, the open source drivers were first unveiled in December (kudos to Adafruit Industries and its related bounty). But it really wasn't until this year that the "Kinect hacking" movement really took off. Anyone with the $149.99 motion / voice sensor could download the freely-available tools, and from that came a burst of crazy art projects, robots with better depth perception, new medical research, the requisite Minority Report-style UI experiments, and a lot more — it even made Skyrim for PC a wholly immersive experience. Microsoft eventually joined the fun in a very big way by announcing both a commercial SDK (currently available in beta, expected to roll out officially in early 2012) and a Kinect Accelerator program that'll help fund developers and startups.

On the consumer side, Kinect has continued to sell massively well — 750,000 units on Black Friday alone. The games aren't quite at level yet (2011 standouts include Dance Central 2, Child of Eden, The Gunstringer, and tighter integration with Xbox Live), but that number is growing and it obviously hasn't deterred sales. It's clear there's a fascination with the concept of Kinect even on a consumer level, and Microsoft's made it pretty clear it sees Kinect as an important part of its strategy going forward.

Cyberwarfare and internet espionage

In the past we've only followed the occasional National Security story, but this year it's become an increasing part of our coverage — and in 2012 this will most definitely continue to be the case. In the past two months alone we've seen attacks against the US Chamber of Commerce, Landsat-7 and Terra-AM1 satellites, various chemical companies, and more. While China isn't the only country guilty of this sort of thing, it's generally agreed that Chinese hackers are "the world's most active and and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage." That's according to a report called Foreign Spies Stealing US Economic Secrets in Cyberspace published by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive this October.

A quick look at the report anticipates a future where the increasing proliferation of connected devices (with ever more complex hardware and software, and companies less willing to take the time to properly test them), the widespread adoption of cloud computing, and the further growth of multinational corporations (causing national boundaries to become increasingly irrelevant) creates a level playing field for both states and non-state actors engaging in cyberwarfare. While China and Russia will continue to be big players, the report lists "hackers for hire" and hacktivist groups as possible "game changers," in a sense democratizing the threat these attacks pose.

High-def phones take over

A trend that started late this year with devices like the LG Optimus LTE, HTC Rezound, and Galaxy Nexus, 720p displays are poised to take the mobile industry by storm in 2011. It wasn't more than a year and a half ago that WVGA was considered the cream of the crop — but since then, we've blown right through qHD and into 1280 x 720, a resolution that finally matches (and, depending on screen size, exceeds) the stunning "retina display" pixel density that debuted on the iPhone 4 in 2010. These screens are so dense, in fact, that it's unclear whether we'll ever need a higher resolution on sub-5-inch devices.

Content creators finally embrace converged devices

Smartphones, tablets and smart TVs all demonstrate how far technology has converged over the past decade, but content creators still aren't on board: rather than let you seamlessly slide your multimedia from computer to TV to phone and back again, they've long fought tooth and nail to keep it siloed. We're already seeing some loosening of the restrictions, however, with Netflix and Hulu Plus making it to mobile phones and set-top boxes with theoretically open software on board — not to mention all the streaming music services we've seen — we have a feeling that it's only a matter of time before the right DRM and monetization opportunities tempt content creators to embrace the likes of Google TV completely. Or, maybe Steve Jobs really did "crack" it, and 2012 will be the year that Apple's television changes everything.

Lytro and light field photography

In October, we tried a brand-new technology that blew us away: Lytro's plenoptic camera, which uses a proprietary sensor to capture interactive images you can refocus after the fact, apparently by capturing entire rays of light rather than just a pattern of photons on a 2D sensor. We weren't quite as impressed with the flashlight-like form factor of the company's prototype camera and its tiny images, but the idea is solid gold, and we can't wait to have a Micro Four Thirds-sized shooter or DSLR with Lytro's technology on board.

More ultrabooks: lower prices, more power

If 2011 was the year the ultrabook was born, 2012 looks like it will become the year it learns to walk. Not only are more companies like Dell and HP joining the race, but Intel's future Ivy Bridge platform is supposed to improve performance, battery life, and graphics. Additionally, prices are expected to drop significantly and by year's end ultrabooks will have a new operating system: Windows 8. Basically, 2012 could be the year where the ultraportable finally goes mainstream.

Intel takes another crack at the smartphone market

There's no debating that the smartphone revolution has been powered by ARM. For Intel, that's a big problem — it sold its ARM-based processor unit to Marvell several years ago, and despite multiple initiatives to push x86 architecture into handsets since then, it's gotten zero traction (anyone remember Moorestown and the canceled LG GW990?). It's once again promising that 2012 will be the year of the x86 smartphone (and tablet) thanks to Android support and the ultra low-power Medfield chip... but the ball is squarely in Intel's court to prove it can steal some of ARM's thunder.

Windows 8

While Apple was busy building a tablet market and Google was scrounging for market share, Microsoft didn't have so much as an operating system suitable for larger touchscreen tasks. In 2012, Windows 8 will change that and much, much more, bringing the company's Metro design language, an app store, cloud integration, and ARM support to a general PC audience. On some levels it may look like the proverbial lipstick on a pig, but if Microsoft can sell the fancy new Start Menu to OEMs, corporations, and consumers, it could bring fully-fledged Windows to a variety of new form factors, adding welcome competition to the CPU and tablet markets, and becoming a Trojan horse (in a good way) for cloud computing going forward. If not... remember Windows Vista? Either way, expect a lot of news surrounding Windows 8 computers next year.