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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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 browser that made feature-phone internet bearable
Opera Mini compressed pages on Opera's servers before sending them to the phone, which made it the most-used mobile browser in the world in 2010, especially on feature phones in India, Indonesia,...
Trillions of SMS messages, unlimited plans, and T9 thumbs
Text messaging peaked in the early 2010s: Americans sent well over a trillion texts a year, teenagers sent thousands a month, and unlimited texting was the must-have plan feature. On feature phones...
poke: A Facebook feature that notified someone you had poked them, and nothing else. Nobody knew what it meant. Example: "why does my aunt keep poking me"
Metro live tiles and a fresh start for Microsoft
Windows Phone 7 replaced the stylus-era Windows Mobile with a flat, typographic interface of live tiles and hubs, launching in October and November 2010. Reviewers admired the design and noted the...
The social phone that lasted 48 days
Microsoft's Kin One and Kin Two, aimed at teenagers who lived on Facebook and Twitter, went on sale in May 2010 on Verizon and were discontinued on 30 June, after reportedly selling only a few...
Samsung Focus, HTC HD7 and the Metro tiles
Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in Europe on 21 October 2010 and in the US on 8 November, with phones such as the Samsung Focus, HTC HD7 and LG Quantum. The Metro interface of flat live tiles...
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...
Gingerbread and the first NFC Android phone
The Samsung-made Nexus S launched on 16 December 2010 as the first phone with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and an NFC chip, years before contactless payments mattered. Its curved "Contour Display" and...
Social news, and the redesign that broke it
Digg let users "digg" stories onto a front page that could crash a small website with traffic. In August 2010, Digg version 4 removed favourite features, let publishers auto-submit content, and...
Three and a half million articles and a new default skin
Wikipedia was nine years old in 2010 and by far the largest reference work ever assembled, with the English edition approaching 3.5 million articles. In May the site switched its default look from...
The $29 upgrade with no new features, and the Mac App Store on the way
Snow Leopard, released in August 2009 for $29, was the Mac OS of 2010: brushed-metal was gone, the Dock was a 3D shelf, Exposé and Spaces managed windows, and Safari 5 arrived in June. In October...
Native video, canvas and the end of plugins, still a draft
HTML5 was a working draft in 2010, but the fight over Flash made it a household word. YouTube launched an HTML5 player beta in January, Apple published a showcase in June, IE9 beta supported it in...
Hosted WordPress, and the software running the blogosphere
WordPress powered a large share of the blogs and news sites of 2010, and WordPress.com offered hosted blogs with themes and stats for free. WordPress 3.0, released in June 2010, merged the multi-site...
One deal a day, and a $6 billion offer refused
Groupon emailed one local deal a day, half-price yoga classes or restaurant vouchers, that only activated if enough people bought in. It was called the fastest-growing company in web history in 2010,...
Reviews of everything, and fights with restaurants
Yelp's crowd-sourced reviews of restaurants and shops were a habit for city dwellers in 2010, and its iPhone app was among the first with an augmented-reality feature (Monocle). Small businesses...
Everything, by everyone: the Flash portal
Newgrounds was the original home of Flash games and animations, where amateur creators uploaded movies and games for the community to rate. In 2010 its Flash Portal still launched careers, and its...
Sponsor of the best Flash games
Armor Games sponsored and hosted many of the highest-quality Flash games of the era, including tower-defence hits and puzzle games, with a brown-and-orange site and a loyal community of players and...
Google puts Chrome on your television
Google TV launched in October 2010 on the $299 Logitech Revue set-top box and Sony televisions, promising web search and Chrome on the big screen with a full keyboard remote. The networks blocked it...
Small share, big ideas: Turbo, Speed Dial and tab stacking
Opera had only around 2 percent of desktop browser usage in 2010 but kept inventing features others copied: Speed Dial, mouse gestures, Opera Turbo compression, and, in Opera 11 in December, tab...
Google's own Android phone, sold online
Google announced the HTC-built Nexus One on 5 January 2010 and sold it unlocked from its own web store for $529, an experiment in bypassing carriers that ended within months. With Android 2.1, a 1...
The first 4G phone in America, on Sprint's WiMAX
Released on 4 June 2010, the HTC Evo 4G was the first US phone sold as 4G, using Sprint's WiMAX network, which existed in only a few dozen cities. Its 4.3-inch screen was enormous for the time, it...
A 12-megapixel camera and the last hope for Symbian
The Nokia N8, released in October 2010, had the best camera on any phone, a 12-megapixel sensor with a Carl Zeiss lens and HDMI output. It ran Symbian^3, which reviewers found dated next to iOS and...
The cheap touchscreen Nokia that sold in the tens of millions
Nokia was still the world's biggest phone maker in 2010, and phones like the 5230, a low-cost touchscreen Symbian handset, were why. It sold enormously across Europe, India and Asia to people who...
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,...
Sending sexual texts or photos by phone; a moral-panic word of 2009-2010.
sexting: Sending sexual texts or photos by phone; a moral-panic word of 2009-2010. Example: "a school assembly about sexting"
The Nexus One with Sense, and Europe's Android favourite
The HTC Desire was essentially a Nexus One with HTC's Sense interface, an optical trackpad and physical buttons. Released in Europe in spring 2010, it became one of the best-selling Android phones of...
The keyboard phone of the business world and the school corridor
The Bold 9700 was the definitive 2010 BlackBerry: a compact QWERTY keyboard, an optical trackpad, the red blinking notification light, and BlackBerry Messenger. Alongside the cheaper Curve 8520, it...
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...
Retina display, FaceTime, and the antenna you could not hold
Announced on 7 June 2010 and on sale on 24 June, the iPhone 4 introduced the 960-by-640 Retina display, a front camera for FaceTime video calls, a 5-megapixel camera with 720p video, and a...
Conversations, labels, and 7 GB of storage
Gmail had left beta in 2009 and by 2010 was the email of choice for anyone under 35, with conversation threading, labels instead of folders and more than 7 GB of free storage. The year brought Google...
Free calls over the internet, video included
Skype was how families called abroad and how long-distance couples saw each other in 2010. It reported more than 500 million registered users, offered free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls, and...
The 2009 iPhone that most iPhone owners still carried
For the first half of 2010 the iPhone 3GS was Apple's flagship, and after June it stayed on sale at $99 as the entry model. Its plastic curved back, 3.5-inch 480-by-320 screen and 3-megapixel camera...
The start of the Galaxy dynasty
Samsung's first Galaxy S launched in June 2010 with a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen and a fast Hummingbird processor, sold in the US under four carrier names (Vibrant, Captivate, Epic 4G and Fascinate)....
The first serious Android tablet
The 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, released in November 2010, was the first major Android answer to the iPad. It ran the phone version of Android (2.2 Froyo) stretched to a larger screen, could make...
Verizon's big-screen Android, sold with a robot voice
Following the 2009 Motorola Droid that put Android on the map in the US, the Droid X arrived on Verizon in July 2010 with a 4.3-inch screen, an 8-megapixel camera and HDMI output. Verizon's "Droid...
A touchscreen slider running BlackBerry 6
Launched in August 2010 on AT&T, the Torch combined a slide-out keyboard with a touchscreen and the new BlackBerry 6 operating system with a WebKit browser. It was RIM's answer to the iPhone at a...
Cards, gestures and a company bought by HP
Palm's webOS phones, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, arrived on Verizon in January 2010 with card-based multitasking that iOS and Android later copied. Palm's sales were weak, and HP announced it was...
Square photos, filters, iPhone only
Instagram launched on 6 October 2010 as an iPhone-only app for square photos with retro filters and reached a million users by December. Its filters, such as X-Pro II, Lomo-fi and Earlybird, made...
Multitasking, folders, and a new name
Apple renamed iPhone OS to iOS with version 4, released on 21 June 2010. It added multitasking (in a limited form), home-screen folders, wallpapers, a unified inbox, FaceTime on the iPhone 4, and...
Digg's redesign removed favourite features and let publishers auto-submit stories; users flooded the front page with Reddit links, traffic collapsed, and founder Kevin Rose...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Google announced its own Android phone, the HTC-built Nexus One, and sold it unlocked from a Google web store for $529, an attempt to bypass carriers that lasted only a few months.
After the 12 January earthquake in Haiti, texting HAITI to 90999 gave $10 to the American Red Cross; the campaign raised more than $30 million and showed how mobile phones and...
HP acquired the struggling maker of the Pre and webOS, promising tablets and phones; it killed the hardware line 49 days after the TouchPad launched in 2011.
The first US phone marketed as 4G went on sale with a 4.3-inch screen and Sprint's WiMAX network, months before Verizon's LTE.
Adobe shipped Flash Player 10.1 for desktops and, within weeks, Android 2.2 phones, with hardware video acceleration and touch support, while Apple's devices remained Flash-free.
Microsoft discontinued its teen-focused Kin phones less than two months after launch, one of the most abrupt product failures in the industry's history.
After weeks of reports that gripping the iPhone 4 dropped its signal, Steve Jobs held a press conference, insisted all phones had weak spots, and offered every buyer a free case.
In the last week of August Gmail added phone calls from the inbox and Priority Inbox, which automatically sorted important messages to the top.
Microsoft's rebuilt mobile OS with its Metro live-tile interface reached Europe and Asia on 21 October and the United States on 8 November.
Verizon launched LTE in 38 US cities for laptop modems, promising 5 to 12 Mbps; LTE phones followed in 2011.
Google and Samsung's Nexus S was the first phone with Gingerbread and an NFC chip.
