XBox 360 + Kinect
Microsoft is rarely thought of being at the forefront of the Web these days, what with the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple hogging all the spotlight. And the XBox 360 has been on the market for six years, so it's not exactly a new device. Yet in 2011 the XBox 360 took major steps from being just a gaming console toward being an all-in-one entertainment platform for consumers, fueled in large part by the Internet.
In December, Microsoft announced a major software upgrade to the XBox that will bring a wide array of content apps, pitting it against Google TV, Apple TV, Boxee and Roku. Crucially, consumers can also now get get traditional pay TV services through the XBox platform, which …show more content…
However, with this iteration, the device became much more of a content creation and publishing tool, which helps fuel creativity on the two-way Web. The Safari Web browser did see some improvements with the launch of iOS 5, and there are some very capable third party browsers available for the iPad.
Perhaps the device's biggest impact on the Web has been due to its leadership position in the tablet market in general. Since the 2010 launch of the iPad, consumers have been snatching up tablets on a huge scale, and competing devices stand to push adoption even further.
This shift toward tablet computing - still in its early days - has already had a major affect on the way people use the Web and how websites are constructed. HTML5 was one of the key buzzwords of the year, in no small part because adoption of the technology makes it easier for Web developers for forge apresence on any screen. Apple's refusal to support Flash, coupled with the popularity of its devices, has led developers to more aggressively adopt open standards like HTML5 and even caused Adobe to abandon the mobile version of Flash altogether.
2. The Kindle …show more content…
Early tests indicate the implementation of the technologyhas some growing to do, but the concept could lend itself to a faster Web browsing experience for consumers.
1. iPhone 4S + Siri
Apple may not have launched the iPhone 5 everybody was hoping for in October, but the device they unveiled has nonetheless had a major impact. On the surface, the iPhone 4S appears to be just another slight iteration in the iPhone product line, and in a sense it is. Its camera is slightly better and its processor faster than that of the iPhone 4. The screen resolution is the same, as is the amount of memory and the physical design of the device.
Despite the fact that it wasn't a radical overhaul of the product, the iPhone 4S broke Apple's own sales records within the first few days of its availability.
It also introduced the world to Siri, the voice-controlled mobile "personal assistant" that has been the subject of both awe and ridicule. Siri is not an Apple invention, but rather comes from a company Apple acquired in 2010. The artificial intelligence and voice search technology has its roots in the same U.S. military research agency that gave birth to the Internet