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The world's most-used smartphone OS, and nobody in Silicon Valley cared
Symbian, the operating system on Nokia's smartphones, still had the largest share of smartphone sales worldwide in 2010, about 37.6 percent according to Gartner, ahead of Android at 22.7 percent. It...
app: A smartphone application; the American Dialect Society's 2010 word of the year. "There's an app for that." Example: "is there an app for that?"
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...
DSL or cable, a few megabits, and a router with WEP
About two-thirds of American adults had home broadband in 2010, according to Pew, mostly DSL or cable at speeds of a few megabits per second; the FCC's National Broadband Plan set a target of 4 Mbps...
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...
The 99-cent game that defined the smartphone era
Released for iPhone in December 2009, Angry Birds became the best-selling paid app of 2010, arrived free on Android in October, and passed 50 million downloads across platforms by December. Its...
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 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...
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...
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...
Press the red button, flip out the USB plug
The Flip Video, owned by Cisco since 2009, was the pocket camcorder of 2010: a big red record button, a flip-out USB connector and one-click YouTube uploads. Millions were sold before smartphone...
AT&T replaced its $30 unlimited iPhone data plan with 200 MB for $15 and 2 GB for $25, effective 7 June, the beginning of the end of unlimited mobile data in the US.
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