July
Apple's oldest competitor suffered the humiliation of abandoning its own smartphone project just a few months after launching it, when Microsoft announced it was giving up on Kin at the start of July. While we might look back on it as a pre-WP7 experiment in the fullness of time, it was hard to find anything positive about that news at the time.
The next generation of IPTV began to take shape, with YouView (then still known as Project Canvas) gearing up for a 2011 launch in spite of wobbles from some partners, and objections from competitors.
Apple promised to put a bit more effort into its Apple TV product, while Google lobbied for an open IPTV standard in the US.
The economic recovery gathered pace, in the tech sector at least, with Intel, Apple and Microsoft all having great quarters. And in the UK, our economy was being viewed is a slightly more positive light following the decisive actions of the new government.
With all the fuss around tablets, the e-reader market had come under severe pressure as many were reasoning that they wouldn't need a separate e-reader if they had a tablet. As with any specialist vs. converged device comparison, there are strong arguments on either side, but Amazon responded well with a new Kindle that was both better and cheaper than its predecessors.
