Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review it's time for our 2011 year in review join us as we examine the highlights and low points we saw this year in the technology world are you still glad you bought an ipad 2 or an iphone 4s wondering why you're still holding on to your netflix subscription we'll look back at a kooky camera that you don't have to focus complain again about yet another facebook redesign and say a final goodbye to a beloved visionary it's all coming up right now hi everyone I'm Molly wood and welcome to the Cena tech review year in review for 2011 normally on the show we collect our hottest videos of the week and tell you what's good and what's bad in the world of tech plus offer our own unique tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line will kind of do that this time but instead of a week's worth of product and news we'll do a whole year of the most notable gadgets good and bad and the news stories that we saw this year now we have a lot to get through so let's start things off with the good the year started off hot with one of the most anticipated devices of the previous year while every other tablet maker was struggling to play catch-up and we'll get to that later Apple came out of the gate with the ipad 2 and crushed it we're going to introduce today ipad 2 the second generation ipad our own Donald bell called it predictable and awesome with it's much thinner design faster processor and front facing camera plus of course the little magnetic cover that rocked our collective tech world for me the reason I keep coming back to the ipad is the apps there's really no beating the selection and the quality of the stuff you can download here at launch their over 65,000 apps designed specifically for the large screen of the ipad no one else has that and it's a key part of what keeps the ipad fresh and fun thinner lighter faster there's more carriers more colors more cameras and more apps and you'll ever need if you're looking for the best all-around tablet this is the one obviously the ipad 2 wasn't the only huge apple release of the year months of speculation about iphone 5 brought us to the big reveal in october and it was not the iphone 5 i'm really pleased to tell you today all about the brand new iphone 4s man listen to that half-hearted applause the mass is how old about the unchanged design the lack of 4G and all of that but despite that initial disappointment and of course some pesky battery troubles out of the gate iphone 4s turned out to be pretty darn good iOS 5 added much-needed improvements the camera is spectacular and the voice assistant Siri became everybody's favorite punchline Easter Egg generator and occasionally even assistant who's your daddy you are can we get back to work now in other phone stories Microsoft got serious about its mobile platform in 2011 and unveiled the massive update Windows Phone mango it didn't have Siri but Microsoft promised there were 500 improvements in there we like the spiffy tiled interface features like group contacts threaded messaging and unified in boxes and there were some pretty impressive Bing search features it's attractive it's usable and we expect mango to be a contender in 2012 and beyond there are still some snags here and there and the platform may not be ready to conquer the smartphone world but it is much closer than it was before in other notable developments in 2011 Google got serious about social very serious about social as Larry Page took the reins as CEO he tied the bonuses of just about every employee to social success and took aim at Facebook with a new social network called google plus it took many of Facebook's favorite features and added granular privacy controls in the form of drag and drop circles the key social concept of Google+ is the circle you can create circles for the different parts of your life your work your family your friends your hobbies and then to keep you from getting overwhelmed by all your contact social updates you can watch just what's happening in particular circles by using streams so if you're in the mood to see what's going on with your family you just check out your family stream at this stage in the game Google+ is getting huge traffic but Facebook is proving just as hard to kill as it ever was although they did themselves a little damage we'll get to that in the back meanwhile in other big trends of 20 it was the year of the music services amazon spotify and google music are all trying to win you on to their individual music clouds amazon started it off in march with a cloud drive and a cloud player that lets you upload all your tunes to amazon server and then stream them from anywhere of course by the time we uploaded all that music and it took a while spotify arrived stateside with the ability to subscribe and then play any song anytime minus the uploading and then just as we got used to spotify google came along with google music cloud storage locker streaming plus some staff recommendations how adorably your 2000 it does have good sharing though including one full song share with your Google+ friends it's an abundance of riches in the music world in fact I think at this point I might be using some combination of all three of those exhausting but if you were bored by yet another version of cloud storage and a digital music locker Along Came some all new technology mid-year to get us excited about of all things cameras I mean look at this thing hey guys Brian song here with Cena TV and we have a first look at the electro camera this is the first ever a light field camera now you see this design it's really unique it's not a traditional camera because this camera does not do traditional things the light field technology and the Lytro promises to capture all the information in an image you don't need to focus and then you create a full 3d image that you can manipulate later no matter what I take right now after the fact I'll be able to choose what I want to focus on um awesome i pre-ordered the blue one and it had better ship in February like they say and finally here in the good we went into the year talking tablets no surprise were leaving the year talking tablets ipad 2 may have kicked things off but by year's end all we could talk about were the kindle fire and surprisingly the HP TouchPad with the fire announcement amazon put the tablet world on notice announcing a hundred ninety nine dollar device that doesn't try to be an ipad it tries to be an e-reader a movie viewer and a basic web surfing device all time to emma's and all for a hundred ninety-nine bucks at that price I think it's a slam dunk you're getting more entertainment options than on barnes & noble's nook tablet more screen than Apple's 199 dollar ipod touch and an ease of use you're really not going to find at any price now speaking of low-priced tablets the HP TouchPad was just another ipad competitor when it launched early in the year in fact it felt more like an ipad one competitor than an ipad 2 competitor but when HP killed off the touchpad just a few months after it went on the market and then started selling it for 99 bucks it suddenly became the must-have tablet of the year it rocketed to the number two best-selling tablet after the iPad what a difference of four hundred dollar price cut makes on friday after HP's announcement that it was going to discontinue its touch pad tablet the company announced an inventory fire sale touch pads began liquidating at retailers around the country for just ninety nine dollars for the 16 gigabyte version and a hundred and forty nine dollars for the 32 gigabyte version the nation's largest electronics retailer bestbuy reversed itself when it decided to join the cell rather than just return shipments back to HP I've been trying to pick up one of those $99 touch pads for months now I am still holding out hope and I'm exhausted already but we haven't even gotten to the juicy stuff in the bad yet so before we do let's take a quick break we'll be back with more Cena tech review right after this welcome back to the cnet tech review our weekly video digest of all things good and bad we've seen here at cnet TV this week we're taking a look back at the tech year that was 2011 we've seen a lot of great stuff so far but it wasn't all good news this year as you'll see in our look back at the bad let's be honest 2011 was the year of the also-ran tablet the motorola xoom kicked off the android tablet fanfare in march but its high price and buggy honeycomb installation kept it in the niche category tablet after tablet followed remember some of these names lenovo ideapad k1 the Vizio tablet the sony s tablet that was actually kind of cool the lenovo ideapad a10 sheba thrives 7 inch tablet the asuste iconia tab a501 4g on 18 t the asus eee pad slider s101 only the Samsung Galaxy Tab line had any traction at all but Samsung spent the whole year fighting patent infringement lawsuits from Apple and of course there was the ill-fated blackberry playbook which best did not even speak of it the top of the PlayBook is a sour note for me there's a headphone jack and a pair of stereo mics that's fine but the power button if you can see it is this little teeny tiny thing made for baby fingers it's also the button you'll need to use for waking the screen out of sleep mode so you'll have to contend with it every day frankly I think the asuste transformer prime could turn it all around though go check out that review at seen at tv.com bad tech news dominated 2011 as a massive earthquake and tsunami brought devastation in Japan it killed thousands it brought the country to the brink of nuclear disaster and the effects on global manufacturing are still being felt stateside we said goodbye to the u.s. manned space shuttle mission with final voyages by discovery and Atlantis then again at the end of the year scientists noticed a potentially earth-like planet in the habitable zone so maybe we'll be back in spacecraft sooner than expected and crazy times at some big-name companies HP abruptly killed off its webOS division and announced plans to spin off the pc unit then the board can the guy who came up with that crazy idea after hiring that guy and installed meg whitman in his place at press time whitman was still trying to decide what to do with webos and presumably the rest of the company wow it was a rough year for Netflix to first the company announced in july that it would hike prices around sixty percent and try to push more users towards streaming only plans users revolted and quit not surprisingly the concept of a roughly seventy percent price hike for DVDs and streaming made people who are addicted to TV and movies lose their minds the netflix facebook page is filled with angry messages from people who say they're canceling their service I mean I'm sorry Netflix that's just you know I love you I'm just not sure that I'm in love with you like I was and I guess I just think maybe it's time to start seeing other people then Netflix said it was split into two companies and the second one quick stir would handle DVDs while Netflix just did streaming users were bolted and quit the online streaming service will keep the netflix name if you're confused and annoyed from the changes Netflix is well aware the company co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings is responding to thousands of angry comments on the netflix blog after writing an apology and explanation about the decision saying this is a move to help strengthen the selection of shows on the streaming service finally Netflix announced that it was really really sorry and would stay together after all price hike and all users revolted and quit Netflix said it would continue to operate one website for both services CEO Reed Hastings said in a statement consumers value the simplicity netflix has always offered and we respect that there is a difference between moving quickly which netflix has done very well for years and moving too fast which is what we did in this case like I said bad year for Netflix also a pretty bad year for Sony which was hacked over and over again all spring the worst attack took down the PlayStation Network exposed the user information for some 70 million people and may have exposed credit card data as help security analysts say this breach is one of the top five in history identity theft is a serious concern and you should pretty much not trust any email that you receive from anyone for I don't know like the rest of your life especially after the whole epsilon thing a couple of weeks ago oh and no as usual there's really nothing you can do here except sue as part of a massive class action lawsuit and then six years from now you'll get a check for about three dollars sometimes the cloud kind of sucks it took so knee some two weeks to restore partial service about a month to get psn fully up and running and then it was hacked again in September plus there were smaller hacks on Sony sites around the world for weeks in fact summer 2011 was the summer of the hacker anonymous was constantly in the news along with its splinter group losec which actually took responsibility for the Sony hack lil sec also defaced the PBS website hacked Nintendo and even messed with Rupert Murdoch the news of the world scandal has brought the hacker group lols sec out of retirement News Corporation newspaper the sun's homepage was attacked and directed visitors to a fake article claiming that CEO Rupert Murdoch was dead later the sun's website redirected to lull sex twitter feed taking a step even further the hacker group then tweeted the name and phone number of a son online editor and two others associated with the company although the group was mostly vapor by the end of the year after increasing international heat and multiple arrests now we would be remiss if we didn't take a poke at Mark Zuckerberg in our year-end wrap up Facebook's f8 conference brought us the big fancy new timeline and Open Graph the seamless sharing that means that in the future every time you listen to a song read an article comments on a post watch a movie pick your nose it will get Auto posted to Facebook Oh 2012 year of Google+ and after a sea of bad news October brought us news that will change the tech world forever on October for 2011 Steve Jobs died she is only comes around once I know couple centuries so like this so sing banks and rusted piece I don't really think that words can really describe like anything about Steve other than just greatness it's just right to do you know to respect a guy who had given the world so much like in terms of Technology and you know rejuvenated a company that was on the edge of disaster just feel incredibly sad I think the world over us lost a really incredible man and a visionary and he will be he'll be deeply missed he's just one of the best minds of our generation I mean it's there's no other way to say I mean he's so affected our generation so and those younger than me much you know so deeply because it's just changed the way they've all communicated with each other so I can't there's really there isn't really words to express how much each change society it's incredible the bottom line for 2012 r.i.p steve jobs what's next for apple is it an opportunity for some other company or will Steve's legacy carry apples dominance into the next year and beyond it's hard to say but as the steve jobs biography started popping up in everyone's hands at the end of 2011 it was pretty clear the tech world just wouldn't be quite the same so there you have it we've reached the end of the show and the end of another year but come back next week for an all-new Cena tech review until then there are tons of great videos available every day at cnet TV com I'll see you next time and thank you for watching