Mobiles the winners in 2011

The life and death of Steven P Jobs dominated technology news this year.

Unsurprisingly, given his achievements as a ground-breaking innovator who revolutionised six different industries before he turned the tech start-up he began in his parents' garage into the most valuable company in the world. His death on October 5 of cancer was the biggest tech news of a year that had its share of highlights.

It began with Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, stunning the cellular industry in February by declaring the world's largest cellphone manufacturer was like a "burning platform" and ditching its own operating system in favour of long-time rival Microsoft's.

Written off by much of the telecoms industry, including myself initially, the two wounded giants appear to have created a necessary synergy to combat the new two-horse race in mobiles: Apple and Android.

This was also the year the smartphone outsold the personal computer - the increasingly powerful hand-held computer replaced its desktop forebear in sales volume as it has in pretty much everything else except working on a spreadsheet or a presentation.

We now live in a truly mobile, cloud-based world. Africa was confirmed as the fastest-growing mobile market, with 649million subscribers, second only to Asia.

Social media played an integral, if not overstated, role in the Arab Spring - and, along with mobile phones, was the unifying principle in most of the grassroots protests that rocked the world. This led to Time magazine calling "the protester" its person of the year.

Never before has people power shown its strength as it has this year, in revolts against authority and government from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and the Occupy movements.

Facebook - fresh from having CEO Mark Zuckerberg receive the Time honour last year - reached 800 million subscribers.

Android's good news kept rolling in. Daily activations reached 550000 by year's end amid significant consumer excitement, despite a number of patent rulings going against it. One estimate puts Android as a $1-billion (R8.3-billion) a year business for Microsoft, which receives, among other things, $5 (R40) a phone from handset maker HTC, which overtook Nokia's share price.

Conversely, the hits just kept coming in for BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. First, its PlayBook tablet tanked. Then as its share price continued a year-long slide, it was hit by a three-day outage that wreaked untold damage on its reputation and market value.

Despite its superb reliability and value for money (BlackBerrys make up 1.6million of the 4.1million smartphones on Vodacom's networks, according to CEO Pieter Uys, making it the largest of Vodafone's subsidiaries), RIM is on the ropes.

In a triumph of high-definition TV, the All Blacks won the rugby World Cup as the Springboks' lack of a Plan A resulted in theircrashing out to better sides and one-eyed referring.

On YouTube, video views passed 20billion for the first time, in October.

Groupon and Zynga's thuds showed tech IPOs aren't always a sure thing, while Apple's app of the year was Instagram.

Jobs left the IT industry, and the world for that matter, with a much more profound lesson than merely a host of compelling products or even the "insanely great" ideas that underpinned them.

He showed his industry, and the world, that it is never too late to reinvent yourself. Or to get a second chance in life. We all have demons to banish and flaws in our armour to discover - and even in the newest industry of them all there are still frontiers to breach and new discoveries to make. Bring on 2012.

• Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine