May
A consumer electronic product that gained a lot of traction in 2009 was the e-reader and Amazon made waves by launching a large-screen version of its Kindle in May.
Amazon would later join forces with Microsoft to oppose Google's online book publishing efforts, but it left the two giants to battle alone when Microsoft launched its new search engine, while Google counter-attacked with its new online productivity tool Wave.
As GlobalFoundries - recently spun-off from AMD - revealed how it was going to embrace the next generations of SoC low-power chip technology in order to succeed, Time-Warner announced it was going to spin-off AOL. This reversed the merger that came to define the hubris of the dotcom era. Meanwhile, the UK ISP market consolidated with the acquisition of Tiscali by Carphone Warehouse.
Intel's legal challenges continued with it being fined over a billion euros by the European Commission for violating antitrust rules. NVIDIA chose to kick Intel while it was down by complaining about the way it sells its Atom chips.
Both companies, however, had half an eye on the smartphone market; NVIDIA with its Tegra SoC and Intel with its plans to make a derivation of Atom that is small enough to use in phones. No wonder, given the boom in the use of mobile broadband, but low power processor incumbent ARM didn't seem too impressed by Intel's plans.
