By RYAN KIM, San Francisco Chronicle

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone three years ago, he called it "the best iPod we've ever made."

The underlying message was that the smart phone, as revolutionary as it was, was still largely a consumption device. You listened to music, watched videos and surfed the Internet on it.

SAN FRANCISCO - In the world of Facebook, where a popular activity is sending your friends virtual gifts, buying a digital beer doesn't quite cut it.

In science fiction, characters often turn to a portable universal translator to help bridge the linguistic divide, either among humans or with aliens.

AT&T's mobile service has taken its lumps for its network performance problems, something one of its executives acknowledged is an issue in San Francisco and New York.

Apple's recent unveiling of the iPad was primarily a product announcement aimed at priming the pump for consumers, developers and content owners.

But for the notoriously secretive company, the iPad event provided observers with a glimpse of the company's growing ambitions and strategies.

Three years ago, the technology world came to a standstill as Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, a game changer that remade the already fast-growing smart-phone market.

While the technology world waits anxiously for Apple's foray into the Internet tablet market, rival consumer-electronics companies are jumping in, betting that the thin, keyboard-less electronic slate will be the next "it" device.

While smart phones have been with us for the better part of this decade, it was in 2009 that they became a mainstream phenomenon, reshaping what it means to compute, surf the Web and share information.

Led by the iPhone and the BlackBerry family of devices, the smart phone market expanded beyond its roots as a corporate tool or early-adopter plaything.

With the economy ensnaring rival computer-makers, Apple Inc. sailed ahead. When makers of smart phones increased their efforts to catch the iPhone, the company maintained its innovation edge. And when CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs stepped aside for almost six months for what turned out to be a liver transplant, Apple barely skipped a beat.

It was that kind of year for Apple.

Sales of personal navigation devices were blazing through the first half of last year and then hit twin potholes: the economy and the rise of cell-phone-based navigation systems.