The last decade was a turning point in tech innovation. With the Internet becoming more and more accessible and smartphones entering the everyday life of a vast majority of people, the 2010s was the decade that truly launched the human race into the future.
Let’s get back in time to remember the biggest innovations of the 2010s.
1 – Smartphones
Smartphones are definitely the biggest technological innovation of the last decade. While BlackBerry, launched in 1999, was dominating the market in the 2000s, Apple‘s iPhone changed the game in 2007 by getting rid of all the buttons to replace them with a giant touchscreen. Many brands quickly followed Apple’s footsteps. Smartphone users increased throughout the decade, and in 2020, it is estimated that about 2.87 billion people worldwide have a smartphone.
2 – Tablets
Just like smartphones, tablets revolutionised the market in 2010 with Apple’s iPad. With the pros of both a computer and a smartphone, those devices boomed between 2012 and 2016. However, their sales started to decrease at the end of the decade, with smartphones’ screens becoming bigger and bigger and computers adopting detachable touchscreens. In 2020, the iPad still dominates the market.
3 – Intelligent Personnal Assistants
Starting with Siri in 2011 on the iPhone 4S, virtual assistant slowly stepped into our everyday lives throughout the decade. In the mid-2010s, personal assistants became devices on their own with Amazon Alexa and Google Home, and while many are still suspicious about this kind of technology, more and more houses are now equipped with it.
4 – Electric scooters and co.
Even if the electric scooter was born before the 2010s, it is the decade that popularised it. Nearly 233 000 electric scooters were sold in France in 2018, and this number keeps increasing. Indeed, the global electric scooters market size was estimated at USD 18.6 billion in 2019. Segways and hoverboards were also very trendy in the 2010s. It’s not quite Back to the Future yet, but we are getting there.
5 – VR headsets
Virtual Reality is a technology that has inspired us for a very long time. It’s in the 2010s that this futuristic tech was truly developed and commercialized, with the arrival of the Oculus Rift (formerly Oculus VR) in the first half of the decade. Quickly, other companies started to produce their own VR headsets, such as Sony’s PlayStation VR or Samsung Gear VR. This tech is now very popular in the video games industry but is also used in other fields.
While it is hard to tell what the technological innovations of the 2020s will be, engineers are always working on new tech to improve our daily lives. School of engineering such as ESILV gives the engineers of tomorrow all the tools they need to innovate in various fields to initiate future technological revolutions.
Interested in Engineering? Check out ESILV’s programmes.