Jon Lamont’s favourite things of 2024

One of MobileSyrup‘s yearly holiday traditions is for everyone to recap their favourite things from the year. While there’s often a tech angle to these recaps, not everything needs to be tech — it’s just an opportunity to share some of the things we all really liked and celebrate some highlights of the year.

So, without further ado, here are my favourite things of 2024.

Path of Exile 2

Kicking things off with perhaps the most recent item on this list, we have Path of Exile 2. The game launched in early access on December 6th and I’ve been having a blast with it all month and will be playing it well into the future. I played the first PoE on and off for years, so I was quite excited to get in on the ground floor of the sequel.

While I have a lot of thoughts about PoE2, this isn’t the place to get into everything about it. Suffice to say, I’m having a great time and very much looking forward to the full release of the game.

Pixel 9 Pro

Next up, I really liked Google’s Pixel 9 Pro smartphone. I’ve always been partial to Google’s smartphones, even as far back as the Nexus days. But the Pixel 9 Pro was something of a return to form for Google, with the company finally offering two size options for its top-line smartphone. I like smaller phones because they fit my hand better, so over the past few years, I’ve avoided the ‘Pro’ Pixels. However, this year, I got to have my cake and eat it too.

You can read my thoughts on the Pixel 9 Pro here.

More reading and the Boox Go 6

This year, I tried to spend more time reading than I have in the past. It hasn’t always been easy since there are so many awesome things clamouring for my attention (looking at you, PoE2) and less free time to devote to hobbies. This year, the Boox Go 6 helped me read much more by getting me back into e-books and by making reading much more portable. I tend to like lengthy fantasy and sci-fi novels, which aren’t always convenient to carry around with me. But the tiny Go 6 solves that problem for me. Plus, as I wrote about at length in my Go 6 review (read it here), connecting the e-reader with my local library to borrow e-books makes for a truly fantastic combination.

I’d strongly recommend any reading fans out there to pick up an e-reader, whether a Kobo or Boox device (just not Kindle!) and get it connected to your library for a great reading experience.

Mario Party Jamboree

My wife and I love playing Mario Party together, so we were both incredibly excited when we found out Jamboree was coming out this year. And naturally, since we got our hands on a copy, we’ve been playing it a ton. It’s an absolute blast with several fun maps and interesting new twists on the classic party game formula. Plus, there’s a ton of additional content that we’ve hardly scratched the surface of yet. Jamboree will be a mainstay in our gaming rotation well into the new year.

Read MobileSyrup‘s full review of Jamboree here.

Dune

Image credit: Warner Bros.

Finally, we have Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies. As I mentioned in the Go 6 portion, I like sci-fi novels, and Dune is one of my favourite books, so I was extremely excited about the movies, and from a Canadian, no less! Villeneuve absolutely delivered with two films fantastically adapting the book, and I also loved the memes that sprang up from the movies this year.

Honourable mentions
I wanted to wrap things up with a couple of honourable mentions that, while really great, didn’t necessarily fit the top-five vibe for me this year. These include Bluesky, which has an old Twitter vibe that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, while the website formerly known as Twitter has continued to devolve into Elon Musk’s personal megaphone/alt-right chaos. Bluesky has the juice, as they say.

My other honourable mention is really just a shout-out to the whole MobileSyrup team. We’ve gone through a tough year between rough layoffs and being acquired, but the ‘Core Four’ team, as we call ourselves, have powered through and continued to produce amazing work. I couldn’t be more proud of everyone and can’t wait to see where we go in the new year.

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