10 Best products of the past 200 issues (Part 3)
Apple iPad
Unless you’ve been in a deep sleep for
the past 18 months, you may have noticed that the tablet market has exploded
into life. Tablets have been around for a lot longer than you’d think, but their
viability was uncertain for a long time. It took the iPad to unlock that
potential.
Despite Microsoft’s long history trying
to develop a tablet platform, it was Apple’s device that set the world of
tablet computing on fire. By taking the already phenomenally successful iPhone
and stretching it to tablet size, Apple turned Microsoft’s ideas on their head.
Less than 18 months after its launch, the iPad is the dominant player in the
tablet market and the device that its competitor want to emulate-in terms of
design, and also sales.
The most recent of the 10 best products
in this round-up, the original iPad launched in early 2010. It was bigger than
a smartphone and smaller than a laptop-a connected web-browsing and
home-entertainment gadget, portable enough to slip into your bag, but ideal for
surfing the web on the sofa. And the iPad is equally suited to business task
and gaming. The iPad concept introduced a putative third device to the arsenal
of all tech fans. And yet its success is such that for many people it is now
the one device to rule them all.
Rival manufacturers have queued up to
take on the iPad. It’s no surprise: in the first year it was on sale Apple sold
15 million units, wiping other tablet makers off the face of the earth. But
only latterly have tech giants such as Samsung and Sony been able to get close
to what consumers now expect from a tablet. And in at least one of those cases,
Apple alleges the credit it all its own.
Apple has earned a deserved reputation as
maker of some of the most elegant and user-friendly computers, music players
and smartphones in the business. Yet the iPas may be the most impressive piece
of Apple hardware we’ve handled. More important than that: the iPad has both
redefined and reinvigorated the tablet market, and then took it all for itself.
A staggering achievement.
Asus Eee PC
The first Asus Eee PC, the 701, was a
milestone in personal computing. It was the original netbook.
Small, low-cost laptops, netbooks became
for a while the se facto weapon of choice for business road warriors, students
and first-time computer buyers who needed a simple device on which to surf the
web. Tablets and cheaper full-spec laptops have now taken back those markets,
but even today netbooks have an interesting after afterlife as first PCs for
children, and student word processors.
Asus announced its Eee PC 701 and Eee PC
1001 models in 2007, sending shockwaves around the rest of the computing worl
with both their low price and tiny size, almost single-handedly queering the
pitch for makers of Ultra-Mobile PCs. Initially running Linux, the 7 in Eee PCs
ran underclocked Intel Celeron M processors, eventually graduating to Intel
Atom chips. They had tiny SSDs for storage, and cramped keyboards at around 90
percent of a standard model’s size.
This combination of cheap price, small
size and low power consumption was popular, with Asus selling almost 2 million
models in a little over a year on sale. Pretty soon it was releasing 8in and
10in Eee PCs running Window XP, and other PC makers were scrambling to catch
up, producing eerily similar models.
But Microsoft wasn’t keen on XP gaining a
new lease of life, and limited the spec allowed in order to force vendors and
purchasers to select the unloved Windows Vista. As time went by the makers of ‘proper’
laptops found it easier to make cheaper and lighter Vista and Windows 7 models
than be restricted by Microsoft’s stringent rules, and as component prices
dropped full-sized laptops became a better deal. By the time the iPad arrived
and pointed users in the direction of tablet PCs, netbooks were good at nothing
more than being cheap.
An underpowered device in an outmoded
category, when placed next to more recent portable computing devices such as
the iPad, the Eee PC looks like a relic. But when Asus first launched this
low-power, lightweight laptop, it changed the world, introducing what became
known as the ‘netbook’, driving a massive amount of PC sales, and setting in
train the drive toward true mobile computing.
FACEBOOK
Facebook is so good they made a movie
about it, although its inclusion here won’t be universally popular, whether the
service constitutes a ‘product’ is one issue, and whether it is a good one is
another, given the security issues that have bugged the site as it has grown.
But Facebook itself is hugely popular and, unlike almost every other similar
service, it continues to grow at a rapid rate more than seven years after it
was born.
According to Facebook’s stats, it has
more than 800 million active users. The user demographic holds a healthy number
of users in age groups from 13 up to 64 and over, each of whom can exchange
messages and share photos, join common interest user groups, play games,
promote events and more.
Not only the most popular online social
network in the world, Facebook is the biggest photo-sharing site on the planet.
It’s the fastest-growing gaming platform around, and a staggeringly popular
means of communication for users on every corner of the planet. Of course, that
very success means that it is the world’s biggest time sink, and a world-class
medium for spreading scams and malware. It’s also home to the profiles of at
least 7.5 million children, in violation of Facebook’s own terms of service.
And all this from a site founded by Mark
Zuckerberg with his college roommates in 2004. Not even Zuckerberg could have
seen Facebook’s potential, but after initial success with his fellow Harvard
students, Facebook was opened to other US college students, then high schools
and, finally, the world. A combination of good technology and perfect,
fortunate timing, it’s often forgotten that Facebook’s very existence wa
revealed to great numbers of the outside world only when Virginia Tech students
live-blogged the massacre of 32 of their fellow students by crazed gunman in 2007.
But Facebook’s biggest achievement is
handling an exponential growth in users and features, without imploding or
selling out. Facebook is an incredible achievement.
