Year in Review: Best of Tech Broiler 2012
MEEEEEEEEERRRRRRY Christmas and Happy New Year, Tech Broiler readers! Have you all been good little boys and girls this year? No? Well, that's ok. Santa's been bad too.
In 2012, the most popular content on Tech Broiler was by far about mobile devices and operating systems. This didn't surprise me, as mobile was biggest topic of the year, sitewide.
The Exynos 5 System on a Chip (SoC) used in Google's Nexus 10 delivers unparalleled performance in Android tablets. What makes it special is that chip is 100 percent Samsung's design, is the first ARM Cortex-A15 chip to be used in mobile devices, and starting with the Nexus 10, Samsung will use it in completely vertically integrated tablet and smartphone hardware where literally all of the critical components are manufactured by the South Korean electronics giant.
We're going to see a lot more of the Exynos in 2013, on all types of tablets and smartphones, not just Android ones.
- I'm Sick to Death of Android
- The Innocence of Android Fans
- Why Ice Cream Sandwich Won't Be Able To Save Android Tablets
- On Tablets, Android 4.0 is an Ice Cream Headache
- Without Radical Change in Patent Law, Android's Ecosystem Will Die
Let's just say when it came to Android in 2012, I got a bit... grinchy. I went from a Android platform evangelist to a disallusioned and disappointed user. A lot of this had to do with an extremely negative experience with my Verizon Galaxy Nexus which turned out to be a complete lemon of a phone and was the poster child for carrier interference and Android device fragmentation.
In all fairness, Google did step up its game at the end of the year by focusing more on a carrier-indpendent, vertically-integrated strategy with "unpoisonable" hardware running pure Google Experience Android builds in the Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. Hopefully, this trend will continue and the fragmentation issues will be mostly behind us in 2013.
- Apple iPad Showdown: Battle of the eReader Apps
- iPad mini is more than just the sum of its hardware
- iPad 3 LTE comes to Verizon, and all hell breaks loose
- The Fifth Generation iPad and What Apple Needs to Deliver
- Oh Apple Lightning Connector, How do I love thee?
Next to Android, Tech Broiler readers were jazzed about the new iPads. And boy did we have iPads in 2012, with the indroduction of the iPad 3, the iPad 4, and the iPad mini. And the new Lightning Connector first introduced on the iPhone 5 really shook things up as well.
- Installing Windows 8 on your Old PC could turn it into Greased Lightning
- Delaying Windows upgrades: Do you feel lucky?
- Windows 8: No, I AM YOUR OS UPGRADE!
- Will the real Windows for the enterprise please stand up?
While mobile got a lot of the attention this year, there's no question that the release of Windows 8 was one of the biggest stories of the industry in 2012 and has generated no lack of partisan opinion about the radical changes made in its overall design.
While I was skeptical about Windows 8 during the early beta phases in 2011, I grew to like the OS and now even prefer it to its predecessor. Even more surprising, I ended up going to work for Microsoft!
What were your favorite (or most hated) Tech Broiler stories in 2012? Talk Back and Let Me Know.