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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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...
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)....
Nintendo's best-reviewed game of the decade
Super Mario Galaxy 2, released in May 2010 for the Wii, added Yoshi and even more inventive gravity-bending levels to its predecessor's formula. It was one of the highest-rated games of the year and...
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,...
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 &...
The fast newcomer with tabs on top and one box for everything
Chrome went from about 5 percent of worldwide browser usage at the start of 2010 to roughly 15 percent by December. Version 4 added extensions in January, version 5 in May was the first stable...
Still the best-selling console, four years on
The Wii remained the best-selling home console in 2010 thanks to Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Just Dance 2 and Super Mario Galaxy 2. Its motion controls inspired both PlayStation Move and Kinect, and the...
The default browser of Windows 7 and roughly a third of the web
Internet Explorer 8, bundled with Windows 7, was the single most-used browser version of 2010. It had tabs, a separate search box beside the address bar, Accelerators, InPrivate browsing and a...
The alternative browser with a thousand extensions
Firefox 3.6, released on 21 January 2010, was the browser of choice for people who cared, with about 30 percent of worldwide usage. It added Personas skins, plugin-crash protection and faster...
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...
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...
The P2P client a court shut down in October 2010
LimeWire was the file-sharing program of a generation: a green-and-grey Gnutella client full of misnamed MP3s, fake files and viruses. On 26 October 2010 a federal court injunction forced it to stop...
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...
Collateral Murder, the war logs and Cablegate
WikiLeaks defined the news in 2010. It published the Collateral Murder helicopter video in April, the Afghan War Diary in July, the Iraq War Logs in October, and began releasing US diplomatic cables...
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...
Hardware acceleration and HTML5, in a minimal new frame
Released on 15 September 2010, the IE9 beta was Microsoft's answer to Chrome: a stripped-back interface with tabs beside the address bar, GPU-accelerated rendering, and real HTML5 and CSS3 support....
The torrent tracker that would not die
The Pirate Bay was the world's best-known BitTorrent index in 2010, a year after its founders were convicted in Sweden. Its pirate-ship logo, comment threads and "legal threats" page made it a symbol...
The MP3 blog aggregator
Hype Machine tracked hundreds of MP3 blogs and let you stream whatever they had just posted, with a Popular chart that could break a band. In 2010 it was the front page of the music-blog era,...
Books, Kindle, and a store that sold everything
Amazon in 2010 was the everything store with a cluttered tan-and-orange homepage, two-day shipping for $79-a-year Prime members, and a Kindle business so successful that the company said Kindle books...
Dial-up subscribers, AIM, and a content empire in the making
AOL was spun off from Time Warner in December 2009 and spent 2010 remaking itself as a content company: it bought TechCrunch in September, ran Engadget, and still collected subscription fees from...
Nickelodeon's Flash arcade
Addicting Games, owned by Nickelodeon's parent Viacom, was one of the most-visited casual game sites in 2010, with categories like Shooting, Puzzle and Sports and a front page of ad-supported Flash...
Your personalised homepage of gadgets
iGoogle let you build a homepage of widgets: Gmail, weather, news, a to-do list and thousands of gadgets, with themes that changed with the time of day. In 2010 it was one of the most popular start...
Reader mode and extensions, in brushed aluminium
Safari 5, released on 7 June 2010 for Mac and Windows, added Reader (a clean article view), extensions, Bing as a search option and a faster Nitro JavaScript engine. On the Mac it was the default, on...
At a San Francisco event, Apple introduced a 9.7-inch tablet starting at $499, mocked for its name and praised for its screen. It went on sale in April and sold almost 15 million...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
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.
