The Year's Best Gadget Ideas

valdean writes "David Pogue, the influential personal technology columnist for the New York Times, has chosen what he calls '10 of the year's best small, sweet improvements in our electronic lives.' Rather than your average pseudo-commercial list of branded devices, it's a list of improvements. As Pogue puts it at the end of his column: 'Come New Year's Eve, raise one tiny toast to the anonymous engineers whose eccentricities or idealism brought these sparkling developments to life.' They are (sans explanation): the folding memory card, the voice mail VCR, the front-side TV connector, the bigger-than-TV movie, TV à la carte, the outer-button flip phone, the free domain name, the modular DVD screen, the family-portrait burst mode, and the hybrid high-definition tape.'"

Comments

Is this a gadget?

[dada21]

USB charging ports on cell phones is my favorite "gadget" for the past year. I'm not sure if they existed in 2004, but I have 3 different phones in my household that use USB charging ports, and it is a Godsend for my desk.

The other "true" gadget that I really appreciate is the iPod. I don't use it, but it surpassed the WAF (wife acceptance factor) enough that I literally saved about 50 square feet of wall space by dumping all our CDs permanently, and saved 3 units of shelf space in the entertainment center as the CD changers are gone.

Buttons on the outside?

[AndreiK]

Is it just me, or does that "feature" completely remove the whole purpose of a flip phone?

The main reason I use a flip phone myself is so that I can carry it around in my pocket without having to mess around with the keylock - and by the time you turn keylock off, the call goes bye-bye. If they put on the outside, you can't just slip it in your pocket and go - there will be a lot more missed calls.

If you don't want to go to NYT...

[hostingreviews]

If you don't want to login to NYT, heres my "Top Ten List of New Cool Crap for 2005":

1. Curious Georges new free Wiretap program
2. Birdflu v.2.0
3. Boxing Day sans Tsunami
4. European CIA Jail System
5. Removal of Marti Gras from your travel ideas
6. A (great) Daily Show spinoff
7. The spread of Scientology
8. Marines shooting at and killing escaping hostages
9. Adoption Press Release Kits
10. Stem Cell Magicians

Ultra Bright LEDS

[Frogbert]

I don't know when they were actually invented but ultra bright LEDS are a huge invention. These days its possible to have LED traffic lights that wouldn't be possible 5 years ago.

TV a la carte?

[J. Random Luser]

Hardly, there's an ovenful more in the kitchen than what's on the menu.

It took Apple to persuade them to dip a little toe into the Internet waters. ABC took the first plunge, offering iPod owners five shows' worth of archives for a perfectly pitched price of $2 each - and no commercials. NBC came next with a broader menu of shows. The concept was a hit, the floodgates have opened, and the era of downloadable, reasonably priced, lightly copy-protected TV episodes is finally upon us.

Now when (if? :-( the MPAA finally get this clue, it will be a development worth writing up.

Offtopic, but relevant to ./ posting NYT articles

[arth1]

Jesus Christ. Just register for crying out loud. It takes a couple of seconds and saves you from copy and pasting logins that might not work every time a new article pops up.

True, Bugmenot is useful for sites I rarely visit yet force me to register. But for NYTimes? Come on! And if you don't want to give out your personal info, just fake it. Ugh.

I think you're assuming that other people are using their computers the same way you do; not much at all.
Some people use dozens of different computers, and browse so many sites that it's become near impossible to remember the userid/password for each and every one.
Use the "Forgot my password" link, I hear the unwashed ones cry. Again, that presupposes that you have but one email address it could be, and have access to that email right there and then, and betting on the email arriving instantly.

So the only real alternative for many of us is to re-register each time we're on a new machine (or use a new browser on the same machine, or have zonked old cookies, or...), with a new user ID and password. Which we promptly forget.

No, thanks, I prefer a service like bugmenot, until the online newspaper editors get it through their heads that requiring registration was a bad idea.

--
*Art

Re:I'll be rich

[shawb]

I propose that someone write a article on the ten worst top-ten articles of 2005.

Re:Offtopic, but relevant to ./ posting NYT articl

[John Nowak]

Considering that your NYT registration is hardly sensitive data, you should just keep a file uploaded somewhere with your account info if you're really going to so many websites that you can't remember any of the logins (in which case, you may have another problem to worry about).

Re:Offtopic, but relevant to ./ posting NYT articl

[fishdan]

To take it a step further -- rather than a file that's online, how about a site that I could store all of MY insecure passwords so then I'd have access to them from any computer! And, if there were a browser plugin so I could just r-click and have the username and password filled out!!! Damn that WOULD be cool!

Oh, did I just describe bugmenot?