January
It's the time of year for presents, daytime drinking and retrospectives. So HEXUS.channel opened its bottle of Laphroaig early, took a heart-warming swig, and took a look back at a year of technology business and smartphone stories.
As ever the tech year started with CES in Vegas. HEXUS.channel went to the show with its focus primarily on mobile chips and the novel form-factors they were set to enable and we weren't disappointed.
One partnership of chip-maker and OEM was making the biggest noise in this area, with Lenovo having apparently bought huge shipment of Snapdragons. The Chinese chip-maker launched a couple of ground-breaking computing devices running the mobile chip in the form of the Skyline and the U1 hybrid notebook.
Sadly, for Qualcomm and Lenovo at least, these first attempts at a computing device running a mobile chip were soon to be superseded by another form factor made by an OEM that not only has a habit of redefining the industry, but which even decided to make its own chip. More on that shortly, but rest assured Qualcomm and Lenovo had plenty of other stuff to show off.
Other breaking news that coincided with the start of CES included the launch of the first Googlephone - the Nexus One - and Apple moving to ensure Google wasn't going to have everything its own way in the mobile advertising market.
The year started with everyone wondering how well the world was going to rebound from the previous year-or-so's financial apocalypse. As the year wore on, sovereign debt emerged as the big threat, but at the start we were just looking for signs that businesses were going to rebound. Therefore strong figures from the likes of Intel, AMD, Microsoft and Apple were welcomed.
And it was Apple that stole the month from the rest of the tech world, as it so often does, with the launch of the much-hyped iPad tablet. In fact, for the purpose of writing this retrospective, it's quite annoying that Apple launched the iPad in late January as it dominated much of the news in February. We really think Apple should bear these things in mind in future.
In retrospect the significance of the iPad was in defining the tablet category, but at the time we must confess we thought it nothing more than an iPod on steroids. But what steroids! The big innovation what Apple deciding to get into the chip business, installing the A4 chip into its new device. The likely combination of an ARM CPU and Imagination graphics followed the precedent set by TI with OMAP and Samsung with Hummingbird.
