June
The big tech launch of June was the Apple iPhone 4. Its unveiling lacked some of the mystique of previous Apple launches thanks to tech blog Gizmodo getting hold of a prototype that had been left in a bar. But, if anything, that just increased the hype around the product, and it has sold in unprecedented volumes ever since.
And that's in spite of a technical issue, which attracted the kind of attention only Apple can at the time. It turned out that if you hold the iPhone 4 in a certain way, it affects the mobile reception. One of the reasons this turned into such a big deal was a combination of Apple's status as the luxury tech brand, coupled with the initial nonchalance of its reaction to the problem.
It took Apple almost a month to address the matter, and even then it was mainly to scold everyone for making too much of it. Meanwhile Android was going from strength to strength, and Froyo, which offered many advantages over iOS, started to make its way onto phones.
The iPhone 4 features the A4 chip, first used in the iPad. Apple developed the chip itself, but licensed the CPU design from ARM and the GPU design from Imagination Technologies. Both companies had a good year, in part because of this, and move to strengthen their respective positions as the default chip partners in the mobile Internet era.
ARM unveiled a new initiative called Linaro, through which has persuaded partners such as Samsung, TI and IBM to join it in developing Linux for ARM. Just a few days later ARM announced the formation of another development group, this time to optimise the next generation of chip manufacturing process in partnership with IBM, Samsung, Synopsys and GlobalFoundries. Imagination also kept itself busy, launching a new GPU and demonstrating 3D graphics running on an embedded chip.
June is also the month of Taiwanese tech fest Computex, of course, and while HEXUS.channel didn't join the rest of the HEXUS gang out there this year, it was clear that mobile devices, especially tablets, were a major theme, as was the extent to which they would cannibalize the notebook market. Very few of those devices demonstrated made it on to the shelves by the end of the year, however.
