Top 10 devices stories of 2013

It's been as fast-paced as ever in devices in 2013. As consumerisation opens the workplace door to more weird, wonderful or just plain sensible experiences, the grip of companies like Apple and Intel have become ever looser. Apple, in fact, has taken a particular back seat in terms of genuine device news this year. Tesco, on the other hand, seems to be the people's darling.

Meanwhile, Google Glass has spent the year hinting at another change of game entirely, interesting new licence deals have been shaking up the desktop market, and an industry boffin even declared the tablet dead.

Here's Computing's top 10 stories in devices. Please comment below or tweet to @Computing_News if there's anything you feel we've missed.

10. The tablet thing will never catch on, says Nolan Bushnell

Crystallising the ongoing industry debate about the real effectiveness of tablets in the productivity sphere, Atari founder and the "father of the modern video games industry" Nolan Bushnell angrily told Computing that the tablet will never grab more than 30 per cent of the market.

This leaves at least 70 per cent for the good old desktop or laptop which, Bushnell added, "are so far from being dead as for the idea to be ludicrous".

His views chimed with Computing's own research, so perhaps everybody should just calm down about iPads and remember the debt we still owe to the PC.

9. AMD ARM licence points to shake-up of Intel-led PC market

AMD finally became a licensee of microprocessor cores by ARM in May, meaning the possibility of mass production of 64-bit ARM microprocessors.

This spells interesting things for the future of the PC market, which Intel has dominated for decades. Will the vertical approach of Intel, with its devices, marketing and partnerships, win out over ARM's make-first-license-later business model?

8. Microsoft finally gives up on Windows RT

Just as Computing was considering some kind of window sticker or petition campaign, Microsoft finally listened to us.

Despite most IT directors under the sun telling us that the Surface RT was "a bit of a lemon", and even Microsoft's own shareholders suing the company for its cack-handed attempts to sell the device, nobody would ever admit the bottom had dropped out of the ARM-based, neutered Windows experience.

Vague promises of new announcements that in reality were just channel pushes, or attempts to rebrand the Surface RT as a machine better suited to the education sector simply didn't wash.

Nokia was even alleged to be launching an RT-powered tablet of its own "in September", which never appeared.

Finally, at the end of November, newly-minted executive vice president of devices and studios at Microsoft, Julie Larson-Green, revealed that RT's days are numbered when she said that the company is "not going to have three" operating systems in its future business plan. So if it's a choice between Windows 8, Windows Phone and Windows RT... well, you can probably work the rest out yourself...

Top 10 devices stories of 2013

7. Tesco launches its own tablet, and it turns out to be great

Google made the "affordable tablet" its own little party with the release of the Nexus 7 late last year. Subsidised by the internet goliath's vast cash reserves, nobody else could hope to compete with the high-end specs of the £199 7-inch device. And Google did it again this year, releasing a new Nexus 7 that was almost twice as powerful, but for the same low price.

But the consumerisation of technology means it's not just tech companies who are interested in pushing mobile devices to wider audiences and, though the likes of Argos and Asda have tried it before, Tesco managed an excellent balance of specs and savvy marketing push to make the Hudl quite a sensation when it went on sale in November.

With Android 4.2.2 on-board as standard, and a KitKat upgrade promised, the £119 (much less with Clubcard points) Android tablet is rugged, efficient, and contains minimal - if slightly irritating - bloatware.

It's sold so well that Tesco has now announced an upgraded "Hudl 2" is in the works. Lidl has also launched its own £80 tablet that sold out within 24 hours.

Computing found the Hudl of potential interest to an IT manager who may want to cut costs and provide road warriors with a rugged, droppable and easily replaceable mobile solution.

The Hudl is also, as we learned when talking to Tesco's CIO recently, only a small part of a much wider customer-focused data grabbing plan. If we were to award a "Most Tech Savvy Supermarket, 2013", Tesco would certainly be it.

6. A UK school goes paperless

As many IT managers keep umming and ahhing over BYOD policies and infrastructures, some organisations are storming ahead. In April, Computing visited Bolton's ESSA Academy, a secondary school that has gone paperless, replacing every single textbook and pen with a shiny iOS device for each of the school's 900 students.

With exam results reportedly on the up, ESSA's story has been a shining example of how new technology can change things for the better.

5. Firefox OS and the ZTE Open wow crowds at MWC

Nokia, Samsung and Asus could announce what they liked at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in March, but the real big hitter turned out to be Firefox, bouncing back from being "the web browser we used to use" and promising to become a serious player in the smartphone market of tomorrow. Announcing its own HTML 5-based open source OS, and a deal with ZTE to ship the platform on a trademark flame orange handset, Firefox stole the show.

Canonical also announced the Ubuntu Phone project at MWC, but while the Firefox OS-powered ZTE Open is now available on eBay for £60, the Ubuntu Phone's Kickstarter - which asked for an admittedly silly $32m - never saw the light of day.

4. Apple hits a success ceiling

Apple's had another strong year, but that's the rub: the company's not improved - it's plateaued.

Google's Android platform - now on its 19th version - is easily iOS's match on a UI and functionality level, with an app store to match. Four-inch, 10-inch and 7-inch devices abound on both platforms. Some 79 per cent of global smartphones now reportedly run Android.

What Apple arguably needed this year was a reveal on the scale of the first iPad - something nobody realised they wanted, but knew they couldn't live without after just a few seconds. But what people got was slightly cheaper, multi-coloured iPhones, and a thinner, lighter version of the iPad.

Playing keeping-up-with-the-Joneses has hit Apple's stock prices in this year of innovation flatlining.

3. Google Glass shows vision

While a truly excellent use case still needs to emerge, Google's head-mounted AR (augmented reality) device has become a common enough sight at technology conferences now, and feels potentially acceptable as the next evolutionary step after the smartphone. While still only available to special friends of Google, a slimmed-down, cheaper and higher capacity battery version could easily become a serious consideration for all kinds of enterprise use cases in 2014, if the public doesn't get it banned first.

Top 10 devices stories of 2013

2. Microsoft acquires Nokia

Described by ex-BT CTO and tech pundit Peter Cochrane as "like bolting two sinking ships together", Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's smartphone arm didn't really surprise anybody. The previous technology partnership between Windows Phone and Nokia's Lumia devices had failed to make any serious impact on the devices market for over a year, so something major was always likely to happen.

Meanwhile, Stephen Elop's return to Redmond after his lucrative stint as Nokia's CEO has made him the favourite to replace Steve Ballmer at Microsoft's helm.

1. BlackBerry crumbles

It's been rather a cycle of misery for our hapless friends in Ontario. Delivering its BlackBerry 10 platform and associated devices several months late, the company went on to bungle its media relations message on the days up to launch, spend the 30 January launch press conference hyping an app that didn't appear for months, and then sent every journalist home with a device the vast majority reported as unremarkable or worse in the days that followed.

Having struck the iceberg, RMS BlackBerry nevertheless managed to stay afloat, cheerfully passing off the angry gash in its hull as minor dent.

The panel-beating process began with an attempted downscaling of the overpriced Z10 and Q10 device offerings with the BlackBerry Q5 which, while cheaper than the £500 expected for the other two, was still pricier than many Apple products on release.

BlackBerry's main enterprise message during this chaos was that its BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10 offering was still the way to go for business real estate, but Computing had trouble finding anybody who was going down that route, with BYOD already so firmly in place for several years due to an enduring consumer love of Apple phones.

By August, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins had put the company up for sale. Rather than quietly agreeing a buyer and then announcing the news, Heins waited until share prices were on the floor before proudly announcing his firm was up for grabs. It was like watching a man crash a Lamborghini into a wall at 200mph, then erect a shiny used car showroom around the burnt-out chassis.

Nobody was buying, BlackBerry started hemorrhaging executives, Heins departed the company, and incoming CEO John Chen muddled the message even further by cancelling the company sale and insisting loudly and publicly that the company is "still alive" and "here to stay". And thus the saga continues.

Almost a year down the line, the situation with BlackBerry handsets is thus: the vast majority of the app store is tumbleweed. BlackBerry Messenger - once the company's flagship freebie messaging app - has gone multiformat.

The RRP of the devices is still too high, though a canny IT manager could probably grab a raft of Z10s or its younger, massive battery-equipped brother the Z30, for a snip.

But why would they bother? BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10 now supports Android and iOS devices just as adequately as BlackBerry 10s, so if you still believe in BlackBerry, just clap your hands together three times, invest in BES 10, and carry on with your iPhone.