Notable tech products of 2011, from iPhone 4S to Spotify

— -- Think back to the tech products you were anticipating in 2011: fresh tablets, smartphones, screaming-fast 4G service and more.

Now consider which products made a major impact, which fell short, and which frankly came out of nowhere. Who would have imagined that one of the most lust-worthy new products of the year was, gosh, a thermostat?

I've been thinking about all this as I take my customary look back at the products and services I've reviewed these past 12 months.

Some of the 2011 class flopped. Research In Motion's 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook tablet was seriously flawed. The supply of apps was paltry, and the lack of native e-mail was especially shocking given BlackBerry's core strength in the area.

I generally liked the TouchPad tablet from Hewlett-Packard that is based on the slick WebOS operating system that HP acquired from Palm. But after poor sales, HP decided to kill the tablet and send WebOS into a state of limbo. More recently, HP, under new CEO Meg Whitman, has decided to license WebOS to developers and companies.

Even the 2011 products that earned my praise rarely arrived without blemishes. A look at some of 2011's most notable:

iPhone 4S

It wasn't the iPhone 5 that everyone hoped for. But the iPhone 4S is a darn smart smartphone, punctuated by a superior camera and the Siri personal voice assistant. The Siri voice is cool, funny and, yep, helpful — I found no better way to set the alarm clock on the iPhone. Siri is far from a finished feature, though, which is why Apple considers it to be still in beta.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention the battery problems plaguing some 4S owners, which Apple owned up to when it brought out an iOS 5 software fix.

As for iOS 5, it's at the forefront of the iPhone 4S, along with the iPad, iPad 2 and recent versions of the iPod Touch. Among other features, it provides a handy Notification Center and Reminders app, improvements to the Safari browser and, of course, iCloud, the ability to store music, photos and documents online and keep everything current across all your iOS devices.

Sweet mobileoperating systems

I'm speaking of Google's Android version 4.0, known as Ice Cream Sandwich, and of Windows Phone 7.5, known as Mango. The sweet Ice Cream Sandwich update showed up late in the year on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, initially available in the USA from Verizon Wireless. Ice Cream Sandwich boasts some neat, if imperfect, features, including Face Unlock or the ability to unlock your phone when you stick your face in front of the screen. Galaxy Nexus lets you take advantage of NFC chip technology to exploit a feature called Android Beam. With it, you can share a YouTube video, Web page, map and so on with another phone by holding the Galaxy Nexus back to back against another NFC-capable Android device. Unfortunately for now, Verizon isn't letting you use NFC to make mobile payments via Google Wallet.