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100,000 apps, and the Angry Birds free-for-all
Android Market, the store that became Google Play in 2012, passed 100,000 apps in October 2010. Its green robot storefront was messier than Apple's and full of free, ad-supported apps; when Angry...
"There's an app for that": 300,000 apps and counting
Apple's App Store passed 300,000 apps in late 2010 and had served billions of downloads since opening in 2008; the American Dialect Society named "app" its word of the year. Top sellers included...
A 9.7-inch tablet nobody knew they needed
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad on 27 January 2010 and it went on sale in the US on 3 April, selling 300,000 on the first day and a million within a month. It ran iPhone apps and its own tablet apps,...
The world's biggest webmail, redesigned
Hotmail, by then branded Windows Live Hotmail, had hundreds of millions of accounts in 2010, many of them the first email address people ever created. A mid-2010 update added Sweep, Office Web Apps...
What most of the world actually carried
Smartphones were still a minority in 2010: roughly one in five phones sold worldwide that year was a smartphone, according to Gartner. Most people carried feature phones, from Nokia candybars and...
The Ribbon everywhere, and Office Web Apps in the browser
Office 2010, released to consumers on 15 June 2010, put the Ribbon interface in every application, added the Backstage file view, and launched free Office Web Apps that ran Word, Excel and PowerPoint...
140 characters and the Fail Whale
Twitter turned four in 2010 and became the internet's newswire. Users sent about 50 million tweets a day in February and roughly 90 million a day by September, the Library of Congress agreed to...
Flash on a phone, tethering, and a huge speed boost
Android 2.2, announced at Google I/O in May 2010, made Android phones two to five times faster with a JIT compiler, added Wi-Fi hotspot tethering, Chrome-to-Phone, apps on the SD card, and,...
A megabit or two on a good day, and the end of unlimited
Most smartphones in 2010 used 3G networks that delivered a megabit or two in practice, enough for email, Facebook and a slow YouTube video. AT&T ended unlimited data for new iPhone customers in June...
Content-Aware Fill, and Flash CS5's blocked iPhone exporter
Adobe CS5, released in April 2010, brought Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill (the demo video went viral), 64-bit Photoshop on the Mac, and Dreamweaver's CSS improvements. Flash CS5 could compile Flash...
Free TV on the web, with ads, US only
Hulu streamed current episodes of network TV shows for free with commercials, a revelation in 2010 when most television was still cable or DVD. Hulu Plus, a $9.99-a-month subscription with more...
m.facebook.com, WAP pages, and a web that did not fit
In 2010 the mobile web meant separate m.sites with stripped-down layouts (m.facebook.com, m.youtube.com), WAP pages on feature phones, and pinch-zooming full desktop pages on an iPhone. Responsive...
Swipe to slice, avoid the bombs
Halfbrick's Fruit Ninja, released in April 2010, made the touchscreen itself the game: swipe to slice flying fruit, avoid bombs. It was one of the top-selling iPhone apps of the year and later a...
Type a band, get a radio station
Pandora's Music Genome Project turned any song or artist into a personalised radio station with thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Free listening was capped at 40 hours a month in 2010, the service...
A $249 colour reader that hackers turned into a tablet
Released in November 2010, the Nook Color was a 7-inch LCD e-reader running a locked-down Android. Because it cost $249, tinkerers immediately rooted it into a cheap Android tablet, and Barnes &...
An iPhone 4 without the phone, and the teenager's first iOS device
The September 2010 iPod touch borrowed the iPhone 4's Retina display, A4 chip and FaceTime camera, starting at $229. For millions of teenagers it was the first App Store device, used over Wi-Fi for...
Apple showed iPhone OS 4 (renamed iOS 4 in June) with multitasking, folders and iAd, and changed its developer rules to block apps built with cross-compilers such as Flash CS5's...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
The social network at 500 million users
In 2010 Facebook was six years old, had just overtaken Google as the most-visited site in the United States on some weekly measures, and passed 500 million users in July. Its blue-and-white pages...
Ten billion songs sold, and the Beatles arrive
The iTunes Store was the centre of legal digital music in 2010: it passed ten billion songs sold in February, iTunes 10 arrived in September with the ill-fated Ping social network, and in November...
Office 2010 arrived with the Ribbon in every app and free Office Web Apps in the browser, Microsoft's answer to Google Docs.
Hulu introduced a $9.99 subscription with full seasons and apps for the iPhone and iPad, its first step from free ad-supported TV toward paid streaming.
