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World's First Camera Phone
The first digital phone with a camera feature is released in Japan. SoftBank's J-Phone J-SH04 featured a 256 color display with a maximum resolution of 0.11 megapixels. -
Blu-ray Optical Disc
Sony releases Blu-ray discs, which are named after the short wavelength blue laser that reads the data on the disc. Meant to be the successor to the DVD, blu-rays were capable of storing high-definition video at 1080p while older DVDs were only capable of 480p. HD DVDs and blu-rays would go on to compete, with blu-ray eventually winning. -
Opportunity & Spirt Land on Mars
Both designed by Caltech, the rovers were launched in July 2003 and landed on Mars in separate locations in January 2004. They ran 20 times longer than their planned lifetime of only 90 days. The Spirit rover stopped moving in 2009 and communication ceased in 2010, while Opportunity ceased communication in 2018 due to a planetary dust storm. Opportunity roamed Mars for 28 miles over 15 years - a record that still has yet to be broken by any other rover. -
Nintendo Wii
Nintendo releases the Wii gaming console. The Wii featured a remote that you would point at the screen, revolutionizing optical sensors within video games. The Wii also featured different games along with their own controllers for the whole family to play - it was a family-friendly video game console. -
First 1 TB Hard Disk Drive
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 is announced by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, making it the first hard disk drive (HDD) to feature 1 Terabyte (TB) of storage. The world's first HDD, the IBM RAMAC 350, had a mere 3.25 megabytes. This would make the Deskstar 300,000 times bigger, despite being significantly smaller in size.