Pocket-lint turns 5

Happy birthday to us

19 February 2008 0:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Happy birthday us. Today we are all grown up - well sort of.

Five years ago I made the brave decision to launch Pocket-lint and look where it has got us.

In our first month we had a couple of hundred visitors, today we get almost 25,000 a day.

Today, thanks you to, our loyal readers, we've become one of the biggest gadget sites in the UK, bringing you news, reviews, opinions, video, pictures and much more day in day out throughout the year.

Five years ago with a budget of us £14.95 we launched the site offering internet users an honest, independent news and review site not run by a big publishing house.

Five years on we still hold the same values and can still say the same thing. We are honest, independent and continuing to take on the big publishing houses.

So what was the site like in the beginning? Very different. Thanks to Wayback Machine we've grabbed some screens of the site through the years, you should check them out, even I cringed. And I am really not sure where the Manga influence on day one came from.

But the tech world has changed in that time as well. Gadgets and technology have become mainstream, no longer are you considered a geek to be interested in technology.

In 2003 when I launched the site, Halo had just arrived on the Xbox, the hottest phone on the block was the Sony Ericsson T68i and digital camera users were getting excited about 3-megapixel cameras.

Since then we've seen the birth of the Xbox 360, PS3, mobile phones that do virtually everything, digital cameras that have 12 megapixels as standard and numerous iPod updates from Apple.

So what has the next 5 years got in store? Well hopefully more of the same, as we strive to make Pocket-lint the destination on the Web for gadget news and reviews.

In the coming months we've got some great new features being added to the site, we are adding more staff to bring you all the latest news as it happens as well as the low down on what gadgets you should spend you money on before anyone else.

But no matter what we do, it wouldn't have been possible without you. So thank you to our readers, who make me want to come in to work every day.

Stuart Miles
Founder
Pocket-lint.co.uk