On November 1st, 2011, the best Android phone you could buy was the Samsung Nexus S. The iPad’s screen was a scant 1024 x 768, laptops were still mostly fat and ugly, and there’s a pretty good chance your phone didn’t have LTE. The iPhone certainly didn’t.
The Verge, Year One: our biggest reviews from the first 365 days
Smaller iPads, bigger phones, and everything else from the last year
is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.
But a lot’s changed in the last twelve months. For starters, we’ve seen huge revisions of nearly every operating system on the planet, from Windows 8 and OS X Mountain Lion to Jelly Bean and BlackBerry 10. Well, not really BlackBerry 10 yet. Our phones have bigger, better screens, faster processors and blistering data speeds — oh, and they last longer too. The iPad finally got some real competition, from a couple of unexpected competitors — including Microsoft and Google themselves, who have turned from software makers to full-fledged electronics manufacturers. Laptops are thinner, lighter, and more attractive than ever. And that’s ignoring the new classes of device, from the fitness band to the light field camera, that have come into their own in the last year.
Through the whole year, we’ve been putting the best (and worst) gadgets through their paces, trying to figure out which ones are most worth your money, and which ones might just change how we live our lives. Here are the biggest, best, and most important reviews from the first year of life here at The Verge.
1/20Lenovo IdeaPad U300S Intel’s “Ultrabook” designation was meant to make laptops more portable. Lenovo’s IdeaPad U300S made it more portable, and more beautiful besides — it was our runaway favorite of the first round of ultrabooks.
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