The Year's Best Gadget Ideas

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 30, 2005 @02:54PM from the good-riddance-2005 dept.

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.'"

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Is this a gadget? by dada21 · 2005-12-30 15:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.