-
First Camera Phone Introduced
The first ever camera phone, the J-phone, was introduced. A month after being released, they also made a flip-phone version! It had a 256 color display with a 110,000 pixel image sensor. The J-phone was made by Sharp Corporation, and released by Softbank Mobile.The J-phone was only available in Japan. -
Windows XP is released
Windows XP was released based off of the previous Windows NT. XP became widely adopted and was considered more stable than previous versions. Microsoft stopped supporting XP in 2014. Windows XP was developed by Microsoft. -
Roomba is introduced
The autonomous cleaning robot, Roomba, was introduced in 2002. The robot used cleaning algorithms to clean rooms/spaces while being able to detect and avoid obstacles. Roomba was founded by Rodney Brooks, Helen Greiner, and Colin Angle. All 3 were MIT roboticists. Roomba was designed by a team of 8 people, including the 3 named above. -
Blu-ray Optical Disc was released
The Blu-ray optical disc was released in 2003. This disc was able to store higher definition than previous DVD's. Blu-ray was capable of high definition video at 1080p, older discs were only capable of 480p. The difference is that Blu-ray reads discs using a shorter wavelength laser which was blue, where as older discs used a red laser to read. Blue-ray was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association. Sony released the first disc prototypes. -
World of Warcraft goes on-line
Blizzard entertainment released an on-line version of Warcraft, called World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW is an online role playing game where players can choose an avatar and complete quests. Being online allowed players to form guilds and raiding parties with their friends, also including an in game chat. WoW designers are Jeff Kaplan, Rob Pardo, and Tom Chilton. -
Arduino projects come out
In 2005 the Arduino starter kit was released. Arduino is a Java-based board with a microcontroller and signal connectors. It was used for applications connecting to or monitoring the outside world. This allowed users to access a library of programs called wiring, which allowed for simplified programming. David Cuartielles and Massimo Banzi created Arduino in Ivrea, Italy. -
Nintendo Wii comes out
In 2006, the first Nintendo Wii gaming system came to market. The Wii remote used advanced gesture recognition with accelerometer and optical sensors. This allowed players to use physical movements to play the game, opposed to just pushing buttons on a controller. There were several types of physical games released, such as Wii Boxing, Wii Tennis, and Wii Fit. Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto developed the Wii. -
Amazon Kindle is released
In 2007, the first successful e-reader, Amazon Kindle, was released, quickly becoming popular among consumers. The Kindle had wireless access through Amazon.com, and an SD slot which allowed for extra storage. Gregg Zehr is credited as the inventor of Kindle. -
MacBook Air is released
In 2007 Apple introduced their light, thin, high-capacity battery laptop. They based it off of their previous line of MacBook laptops. This included technologies such as the integrated camera and wifi. In order to reduce the size of the laptop, the traditional hard drive was replaced with a solid state disk. Steve Jobs is the inventor of the MacBook Air. -
Minecraft is introduced
In 2009, the popular game of Miecraft was introduced. It allows players to build towers and complete challenges, and can be played in survival or creative mode. It is an entertainment platform used as a creative building system for modeling real life. Minecraft was developed by Markus Person, a Swedish game designer. -
Apple iPad is released
In 2010, the apple iPad was released. It had many of the iPhone's capabilities, just displayed on a 9-inch screen and without the ability of cellular use. The iPad quickly gained popularity as people began using it for art, making music and movies, sales, inventory, etc. Just like the MacBook Air, Steve Jobs also invented the iPad.
