2011 was filled with a little of everything, and as it draws to a satisfying close, we have little more to do than sit cosily in our chairs, sip that hot cup of tea and look back at all it brought us.

Is anyone keeping a tab of this?
There’s no two ways about it — this was undeniably the year of tablets; a presumably tectonic shift in the consumer electronics geography. While Apple upped the ante with the iPad 2, many other manufacturers were (and still are) struggling to put out a decent slate that deserved your cash. There were exceptions, of course, none as humongous as perhaps the Galaxy Tab, but they got into a long, legal soup with Apple over it all, spoiling the broth. Among the frenzied hordes of the Xooms, the Iconias, the Nooks and all that, however, one determined and (superbly priced) competitor came out and gave Apple a fight. Yes, Amazon’s Kindle Fire seemed to have hit the sweet spot. It was as cheap as an iPod touch, but had a big screen, and it was a well-done content consumption device that tied in with the Amazon ecosystem. While the HP Touchpad had the #2 spot on the list for a long time (thanks to its sad, sad Fire sale, and the horrendous aftermath at HP), it has convincingly been dethroned by the Fire, which might just be the most interesting piece of hardware I’ve seen all year.

Light on your feet
Everyone knows the biggest battle is still in the mobile space, isn’t it? And boy did we see more of it. While Apple came out with the iPhone 4S and with it iOS 5, further refining its product line-up in a bid to keep the cash flowing, Microsoft and Google weren’t exactly sitting on their haunches. Android officially became the dominant smartphone platform, which isn’t surprising in India; and Google progressed with Ice Cream Sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus, which seemed fairly promising. With Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, Microsoft fully stamped their feet into the smartphone wars, an indication that they were in it for the top spot and it finally seems to have done more right than wrong here (unlike RIM, with BlackBerry).

Wonderful Web
The internet, as always, gave us some mind-boggling statistics to ogle. Twitter and Facebook recorded exponential growths in their user base, introducing blatant UI changes that had mixed reactions. Google finally socialised with the rest of the world (on their platform, of course) with Google+, and got rid of the world’s worst-kept secret. The cloud, it seemed, incorporated itself everywhere you looked. From iCloud to Dropbox to SkyDrive, everyone is in an apparent race-against-time to get themselves up there, proving conclusively that the cloud is, in fact, good for you. What wasn’t very good, though, was how secure your information is on it. With massive security breaches into services like Sony’s PSN, the cracking community made sure that there was pretty much nothing you could do to hide… except not be on the Internet, of course. But, the horror…

On the PC front
2011 also had us welcoming Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors, a significant upgrade in CPU architecture, which basically blew AMD out of the water. AMD is now retaliating, though, with a new slew of high-end graphics cards, along with its earlier release of budget solutions like Llano. While 2011 was good, 2012 promises to be better. Check back next week for our most anticipated technologies for the New Year.