Happy New Year from the HardwareZone Team!
Strange that each year, life gets increasingly more hectic, especially those who are progressing through their social lives from singlehood, to marriage and then raising kids. Well, it's a good thing technology is ever progressing as well to keep up with our pace of insatiable need for information and to be socially connected. Speaking of social, "social media" is here to stay and key events of 2011 have demonstrated its power and influence to inform and unite people for a cause or concern. That's for lifestyle, but what about tech? If I were to sum up the tech scene of 2011, they would essentially consist of the following topics:-
- Social media goes mainstream with Twitter, Facebook and Google+ taking most of the limelight
- Dual-core smartphones taking center stage of personal communications and entertainment
- Andrioid 4.0, Apple iOS 5 and Windows Phone 7.5 mobile OS Updates
- The year of the Tablets
- Mirrorless and advanced compacts bridging the space between traditional compacts and bulky DSLRs
- Solid state drives increasingly becoming prevalent in consumer performance machines and notebooks
- A much larger 3D ecosystem of products from recording, viewing and playback devices
- AMD's Fusion APU finally bring forth an affordable single chip solution promoting heterogeneous computing whereby applications can take advantage of both the CPU and GPU
- Intel's Sandy Bridge processors that bring a leap in processing capabilities that now power the majority of new systems from desirable notebooks, mainstream PCs and enthusiast/workstation machines
- Remembering Steve Jobs
Rounding up 2011 with the Best Products of the Year
While the above are the larger trends that grabbed the limelight in the tech scene and helped shape tech progression in 2011, there are hundreds, if not thousands of new products contributing to the momentum. To pay homage to the movers and shakers of 2011, we bring you our yearly feature special on the Best of 2011 awarded to the Top 100 products of the year. For those interested in further reading on best products from previous years, you can drill down all the way back to 2005 when we first started the series six years ago. |
The Memorable Moments of Working in HardwareZone During 2011
As we wind up 2011 and enjoy the holiday period, we thought of adding to the fun with some of the memorable outtakes captured during our HWZ TV video production in 2011. Have fun watching the blooper reel!
New Lesser Known Features of the Revamped HardwareZone
Last but not least, we've a few subtle features added to HardwareZone over the last week and what better time to convey those than now. Firstly, we've added a new "Like" vBulletin plug-in to our well used forums. The main purpose of integrating this function is to encourage positive contribution in the forum by allowing members to like individual posts and acknowledge the contributor for his/her valuable assistance. It is part of a grander scheme of things we've in store for the community in the future ;)
The second feature is a more subtle enhancement to our new top black status bar. When you are scrolling through a long page, we've incorporated a "Bring to Top" navigation arrow that would automatically appear on the right-most corner of the bar. Just a small convenience feature.
The third item is even less apparent as it's still a work in progress - a HTML 5 based HWZ TV video gallery. Go ahead and give it a try and let us know your thoughts if any in our feedback forum.
Lastly, we've implemented the Facebook activity box in certain portions of the site to check out the activity and interaction on our page by your friends circle. You can easily keep tabs if there were good updates you might have missed out or forward relevant updates to more friends
Well, that's all the updates we have for now. You can be sure we've even more in store for our readers and members in 2012, so stay tuned to the hottest and most complete tech site of Asia Pacific and be in the know!
Happy New Year and have wonderful start for 2012!
Vijay Anand / Editor-in-Chief
A pioneering contributor of HardwareZone.com since its inception in 1998, his keen interest in DIY computing has helped establish content standards in testing and reporting online, while his drive to share knowledge has laid the foundation of Social Media 1.0 in Singapore via the HWZ Forums. As site editor since 2005, he oversees all content production with the local team, supervises the regional teams and provides forum management insights to the large pool of contributors.