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Ten Gadgets That Defined the Decade
Corpuscavernosa writes "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets — one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade."
The Computer.
Are Windows XP and OS X really "gadgets" though? When I think of gadgets I think of physical things, usually. Maybe I'm just out of touch with the times.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Engadget's justification is rather lame
but Microsoft's audacious approach to charging people to play online with Xbox Live Gold actually ended up as the console's greatest strength, and a key to its staying power
Charging people wasn't its strength. Its strength was it was the one online service that didn't totally suck. Lets see, Nintendo's online service lets you play with friends if you send them a random string of letters and numbers as a "friend code", won't let you type messages on most games, oh and the one game that would have had online as a killer feature, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the online mode is so messed up because it compensates for lag on one player's end by making the entire match laggy for everyone. Yeah Nintendo sure raised the bar high. PSN is good, but has too many flawed features. For example, PlayStation Home. The idea is good, take human avatars to a new level, the implementation is flawed. It is nothing but ads.
Engadget also manages to glance over the RRoD issue that plagued early Xbox owners.
I mean, is Microsoft buying Engadget off? The 360 as the console of the decade? Hardly. The 360 as the console of this generation? Possibly. But not the console of the decade, not by a long shot.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hey Slashdot, when we get stories like this, just list out the gadgets from the article in the story summary that you submit to slashdot.
No one reads the article half the time. And usually, (not the case here) the story is split up among 3 or so pages, with the last page just a page of ads or links to other stories.
So, slashdot, what do you say? :D
Relax, man. You need to go easy on that Apple kool aid.
>>I mean, is Microsoft buying Engadget off?
You must be joking. They are the second biggest apple suckers - gizmodo takes the honor.
In the last 10 years, portable GPS navigation has become ubiquitous in cars.
They're so cheap nowadays that I got one as a gift.
I'm sure there's one that could be pointed to as the breakout device.
/I still have in the car paper maps for ~5 States
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...Until this portable media player reached the 4G iPod (20 and 40 GB hard disk model) and the iPod mini (4 GB hard disk model) in 2004. These were the first iPods with the modern Click Wheel interface only and full USB 2.0 interface support.
Interestingly, it's been said the best-sounding of the iPods are the 2G iPods nano and 5G/5.5G iPods with the Wolfson DAC chip. Mind you, the current "6.5G" iPod classic (120GB/160 GB), 4G/5G iPod nano and the 2G/3G iPod touch overcame some of the early issues with the Cirrus Logic DACs and they too sound quite good.
Canon Digital ELPH (2000)
Apple PowerBook G4 (Titanium) (2001)
Microsoft Windows XP (2001) / Apple Mac OS X (2000)
Apple iPod (2001)
TiVo Series2 (2002)
Motorola RAZR V3 (2003)
PalmOne Treo 600 / 650 (2003 / 2004)
Microsoft Xbox 360 (2005)
Apple iPhone (2007)
ASUS Eee PC 900 (2008)
I sure hope that Slashdot isn't turning into Digg .....
Less space than a Nomad. No wireless. USB. Lame.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The Titanium powerbook was pretty cool, but looks absolutely dated now, like the tail finned cadillacs. I still believe the razr was a very good design. The only issue was that if one used the flip to answer option, the early models did not allow a caller ID. The hinge, though, was very sturdy and I was not able to break it over years of use. Not so for the often plastic sliding mechanisms on the modern slide phones. The draw back was that we still had to enter phones numbers by hand, little synch with the computer. In those terns, the palm treo was a better deal, but the integration of the 'smart phone' was simply not up to speed at that point. The huge size just did not justify leaving the tiny razr behind
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Sometime in the mid-90s the guy I was training and I were having a discussion about the future of technology while we were driving down the road in rural south Texas. I had a bag phone and an IBM Model 70 portable (lugable). He had a Zarus. We both carried pagers. A big part of the conversation was about how someday, we wouldn't need to carry all that crap just to do our job. We both knew that someday all of this stuff would be a single device. Just not a clue what that device would be or how it could work.
Today, about 15 years later, we still work together. I carry a Palm Treo and he has a iPhone. Different job, but mostly do the same thing, just not consultants anymore. I don't think either one of us could do our job without these gadgets. The ability
to ssh into our systems is key to our jobs, and it doesn't really matter what device we use anymore. The gadgets are getting to be more than just a convenience for both of us. They almost define our function in the job. Even if we're out of the office, we still take care of issues, now, not when we get back.
The gadgets have raised expectations for a lot of positions. If I still worked like I did back in the 90s, people would be waiting either until I got there, or got where I could hit a phone line and modem. Now, with the internet (ultimate gadget) and a smart phone, I can fix most problems at 70mph running down the road (as a passenger, of course, not going to break any laws, ha). And that's become almost an expectation.
So, yes I kind of see this as the decade of the gadget, but the gadgets mostly control us.
God help us all.
If you said the 80's I'd say Rubik's Cube, Simon, and other toys. If you mean useful tools and not just novelties, the 80's is when the PC became more than just a hobbyist device. You had early brick cell phones but they truly came into their own in the 90's. Likewise, laptops went from being novelties to useful and only became more awesome in the 00's.
I think setting a round number to meet is kind of dumb. What if there weren't ten notable devices?
I think that the ipod and iphone are probably the most significant devices but not just for what they are but for what they presage. Ipod's music on the go is nice but Apple breaking into the music industry and becoming a major distributor has a far greater impact on the landscape. Iphone put a crack in the usual walled garden arrangement of US carriers and is showing competitors how to do things. Handheld computers have been around for ages but the ipod/phone is bringing us to the point at which there's enough market saturation to change the way we do things.
When I was a kid, only us geeks had computers. You went to school and you looked for other freaks and outcasts. That's where you were likely to find other computer people. And we used computers for the usual geeky stuff, socializing over BBS, playing games, and being geeks. With the arrival of the internet, non-geek households started getting computers. And the early social scene really sucked in the rest of the youth audience. By the time I was in college, everyone had their own computers. And the more ways there were to socialize on them, the more popular they got. Yeah, in the past you had phreakers who were into phones for the tech of it and you had teenage girls who spent just as much time on the phone but only for gossiping with friends. Still, the phone had an impact on society, the way people live.
I bring up the social sites because the phones are providing as much functionality on them as a standard computer. And all of this is having an impact. A lot of people in my age range are going without cable tv, they can download whatever they want to watch. They are dropping landlines since the cell does everything they need. Traditional media channels are going to get boned. And all of this will have a cultural impact.
I can shop on my phone. I can download podcasts, videocasts, tv shows, music, books, audiobooks, access the net, and this is only the beginning. I think we're seeing the beginning of the destruction of mainstream media. Yeah, many have made that call before but I see it happening. Change comes with the youth and ends when the old generation dies off. AM radio is on its last legs. I don't know anyone who listens to FM radio anymore, not anyone under 50. MTV continues to be a joke and sets no trends anymore. Authors are cutting deals directly with Amazon to publish on Kindle. Podcasts and videocasts are gaining wider audiences and network/cable television continues to flounder with their broken advertising model. The shows may have a huge audience but the Neilsen ratings cannot account for it. This is why Family Guy got cancelled only to shock Fox by being a top-selling DVD of all time. They had no idea the kind of reach that show had and brought it back.
Everything I'm mentioning above I think is setting the stage for uncontrolled culture. It took big bucks to fund mass media back in the day. Now any yabob on Twitter can reach an audience in seconds that would make William Randolph Hearst get wood. And the cost? Nothing! They say never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. How much worse does it get when the electrons are free?
Now it's possible that the audience won't fracture that much. Give kids free reign in a supermarket to eat anything they want and you know they're heading to the candy section regardless of how well the veggie section is stocked. Give the masses unfettered access to all media and they might end up gravitating back to the old celebrities or create new celebrities who will take the place of the old. It might still be possible to shape and mold public opinion as easily as before. But I have a gut feeling things could turn out differently in the 21st century. If the 20th century was defined by mass media, the 21st could be defined by what comes next.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
And it will find the nearest Starbucks for me and tell me if they're open.
Yeah! Why isn't GPS on that list?
Engadget mentions that the TiBooks solidified the presence of the widescreen display in notebook computers.
This isn't particularly accurate or true, as the TiBook's screen was only slightly wider (1.5:1) than the standard 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio that has been ubiquitous on NTSC TVs and computer monitors for decades. These laptops appeared fairly square and unremarkable.
For whatever reason, the 15" aluminum PowerBook appeared a bit wider, particularly in the final generation of the model, although the aspect ratio evidently stayed the same. The 17" version always had a wide screen (1.6:1), although all of these fell short of the cinematic 16:9 (1.77:1) ratio also used in 1080p displays.
The 12" PowerBooks always had a 4:3 display, and were IMO some of the most impressive laptops Apple's ever produced, as they were the first laptops to successfully cram a full-featured machine into a tiny chassis without any major compromises. I might be biased, of course, as I'm typing this comment from one such machine -- even for an Apple product, the 12" Powerbooks retain a cult-like following.
If you wanted to ascribe any one model for being a forebearer to widescreen laptops, you'd have to go with the 17" Aluminum powerbook, the MacBook, or any of the PC industry's less-successful early experiments in this field.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The one killer "gadget" of this decade is price. Everything is cheap. Back in 1999, even a cheap desktop would have cost you a lot of money. Today, you can buy a new desktop with HDMI out for $200. You can buy a cheap laptop for $300, or less if you catch a good sale. An iPod touch that would have cost you over $1,000 back in 1999, now is a typical Christmas gift. HDTVs are now cheaper than their standard def tube equivalents were. Storage is now dirt cheap, back in 1999 1 TB of HD space would have cost a lot of money, yet now many desktops ship with that much. RAM is cheap with a gig of RAM costing no more than $15. Software is even cheaper, back in 1999, your choices were either to buy (or pirate, but again, it being 1999 it was a lot harder to pirate it than it is now) Windows, or get an expensive Mac. Today, you can have Linux which is actually easy to use and detects most hardware quickly and easily. Torrent sites are also a killer "gadget", the ability for decentralized downloads have made things much easier to download than back on shady Usenet groups. Openness has also shown to be a quickly rising killer "gadget" with an explosion in open or simi-open phones such as Android, WebOS and even Symbian is opening up.
I think the 2000s will be remembered for cheap (in both meanings of the word) tech.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I think what bothered me with the 360 making the list versus the PS2 is the fact that Engadget editors measured the 360 based on Live, which is a service, NOT a gadget. Gmail was awesome, didn't make the list... neither did DropBox or a bunch of other ways to communicate data. The Dreamcast pioneered the whole console gaming internet thing a bit earlier in 1999 before the PS2 literally nailed the last piece in its coffin in 2001. Microsoft merely took the online idea and threw more money than Sega had to make it happen. Microsoft merely took Sega's evolutionary dead-end and sparked it back to life. PS2 should get honors for standardizing DVD playback, moving forward game based storage to DVDs, and generally offering a baseline standard for what "next-gen" should of been back in 2000. Wii... should get an honorable mention because Nintendo took a dated and... well not a hot selling platform (GameCube) and MacGuyver'd it into something that would sell and drive Nintendo back into a profitable home console platform. The DS came in the wake of the dying PDA craze in 2004 before multi-touch. The pen/stylus setup probably was a risky direction to take since... say the Sony Clie was pulled out during the same time. DS proved that touch-based inputs could work for a massive audience... sparked the direction the Wii took. Today, we have Microsoft and Sony trying to catch up with their motion based interaction setups. Apple and other handheld makers have introduced touch-capable devices on everything under the sun. DS was engineered by people that liked neat things and this happened to be a hit. I mean, TWO screened handhelds seemed a bit unrealistic too. The DS success made Sega's VMU and Nintendo's GBA-GC two screen system link ideas feel like they didn't go to waste. Supplemental screens work if they're designed in every system.
Dammit, people. The decade runs through 2010. 2001-2010. Next year is the end of the decade. Not this year.
From the article:
If you had found me right after I'd installed OS X Public Beta for the first time in 2001 and told me how dramatically the OS would change over the next decade, I'm not sure I would have believed you. There was a gigantic difference in feel between installing Windows XP and OS X Public Beta -- with XP you got that fun sense of having a whole new computer, fast and ready to take on whatever you could throw at it, while with OS X you just sort of stared at the huge icons and wondered, "Now what?" It was clear Apple had a lot of work left to do -- although by 10.3 or so I'd deleted my Classic partition and wasn't looking back. But hold up: OS X 10.3 looks and feels dated by today's standards, while XP looks and feels like... XP. Where Apple did an fantastic job of relentlessly improving and iterating OS X over the past decade, Microsoft set the bar so high coming out of the gate that the biggest threat to Windows 7 is the installed base of XP users who are still happy with their machines. That's pretty amazing. - Nilay Patel
This guy/gal needs to have their head examined. Even talking about the mere aesthetic nature of XP vs. OS X 10.3 (Panther), I can't see where he's coming from in the least:
OS X 10.3 Panther image vs. Windows XP. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how XP looks anything but "dated", the hideous colors/theming aside. 10.3 looks, even now, clean and fresh compared to XP. (Technologically, XP is way behind 10.3 in many ways.)
All I can read there is rabid fanboyism. Sorry, but "staying the same" for the better part of a decade, when you're the computer giant's flagship product, is not a benefit in any stretch of the imagination.
As for their list... not sure why/how the Xbox made the list instead of the Wii. There's nothing special about the Xbox 360, whereas the Wii is a "game changer". Hell, and even Windows Mobile devices (which, aside from the slick Marketing functionality and App store, has been largely comparable for many, many years) should top the list over the Treo.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
To claim that Windows XP coming out of the gate set the bar so high that people won't upgrade to Windows 7 is such BS and complete sucking-up to Microsoft. Until SP2 came out, Windows XP was a nest of security problems that made using it nearly impossible. Wasn't that also the time when Firefox got started because IE was so horribly insecure and pop-up infested? It had so many services turned on by default. Anyone here remember the "net send" pop-ups? That was possible with the default install of Windows XP prior to SP2, IIRC. One thing XP established is the habit of waiting for at least SP1 to come out before switching. Even after SP2, I still switch the theme back to Windows 2000 Classic. I don't know where they got the idea of XP being such a spectacular winner out of the gate. Windows 2000 was revolutionary in the Windows world in terms of stability and user friendliness. Windows XP, until SP2, felt like a step back. For a long time, I avoided the "consumer" line of Windows (ME, XP, and Vista) and prefer to use their "server/enterprise/workstation" line (2k, 2k3) because of the lack of bloat and higher level of security.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
the Apple article today, (or did I miss it?), I’d say:
hwl = filter(dictionary,isHipsterWord); hwll = hwl.length-1
for i in 1..10 {
print i+". i"+hwl[random()*hwl]
}
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I would have thought that one of the Android phones released in 2009 would beat out the Eeeeeeeeeee PC.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
What happened to the good ol' days when all the ads on TV were for cars and breakfast cereal? Now it seems like they're all for phones, and every other article on /. has something to do with phones. I think the world has gone nuts.
Do you people spend all your time wandering the streets lost or what? You're going to pay possibly hundreds of dollars for the initial purchase of, and possibly a monthly service charge for the use of some doodad which is all-too-easily lost or broken. So you can look at stuff on a tiny little screen? Type stuff on a tiny little keyboard? Listen to stuff from tiny little speakers? Access the interwebs through a slow, expensive, unreliable connection? Under an OS that is probably proprietary and feature anemic?
At home, I have a PC with a real keyboard, display, and speakers. Also, being an American who does not live in a dense urban area with useful public transportation, I have a car. And any place I might be, my car is not far behind. It also contains a CD player and real speakers, and can easily be used to haul a laptop which again, sports a decent display and keyboard. But to be honest, I don't take my laptop with me every time I leave the house because when I go to the grocery store it's to buy groceries damnit not read my email!
For heaven's sake people are you really that bored that you need to be constantly dicking around with some thing, sending goatse pics to your friends or whatever? Don't you have actual work to do? Actual people standing in front of you to deal with? Vehicles in front of you to watch so you don't fucking crash into them?
Is a property to carry ads. Most people either don't understand this fact or want to ignore it. It's part of a portfolio owned by a major online advertiser like a lot of similar sites. It's branded advertising.
Quack, quack.
I am shocked and amazed...to find TFA doesn't span 10 separate pages. Thanks, Engadget.
I remember visiting Japan for the first time in 1999. Of course I wandered in to a video game arcade to check out the scene. I laughed at the poor Japanese and their imitative video games - look, that guy is just touching the controls in the exact way that the machine tells him to! What a retarded game! It's no game at all, he's just mindlessly copying what the machine tells him to do in exact sequence...no more "fun" than working on an assembly line. A children's game, really...we had the same thing called Simple Simon when I was a kid...these Japanese video games even have the same four colors. I mean, there could at least be a dozen colors or something, make it difficult. And the controller shaped like a guitar? Oh man, how pathetic: if you're going to be cool and play the guitar, be cool and learn the goddamn instrument, it ain't that hard. Only Japanese people, with their tolerance of tedium and their relentless drive to copy, could possibly "enjoy" such a "game".
This Christmas, I'm passed out from wine, and when I vaguely become aware, I hear these overplayed classic rock tunes accompanied by clicking. I go out, and sure enough, three family members are staring at the TV, imitating the colors on the screen, each lost in his own world with no communication. Just this eerie clicking, accompanied by this sound that I identified from when I was in marching band and the drummers had practice pads. There is no talking, no rocking out, no jumping around the room flailing at an ax like Eddie Van Halen on coke. Their faces are stone masks of concentration. The song finishes, and my family grins at each other, "Wow, we sure had a fun time interacting. What a great game that brings us together!"
Shows you how much I know. I also thought "Magic: the Gathering" was a stupid game because it was so wildly unbalanced. Who would want to play that, a game where you can win not by superior skill or even dumb luck, but simply by spending more money than your opponent?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It would be more interesting looking at influence instead of favourite. I am not normally a look backwards type person, but almost everything that we think of as key to this decade is influenced by this simple tool (or in this case do to intent weapon).
The LCD display.
The only thing that's really changed is that we have finally gotten rid of CRTs.
Everything else is just a bigger or smaller version of stuff we already had.
Most of our new toys are finally possible due to cheap and tiny displays.
These were the first iPods with the modern Click Wheel interface only and full USB 2.0 interface support.
What does that mean? I had the very first iPod. All it had was a click wheel. In fact it was better than a few later generations, since the wheel actually turned and thus gave more feedback.
As for "full USB 2.0 interface", well that was nice for Windows users but a step back from the Firewire400 the original sported. It allowed the original iPod to load songs just as fast as any later USB 2.0 model, and made 5GB of storage practical instead of a chore.
Everything that made the iPod what it was was there from the start - iTunes, fast transfers, click wheel interface, easy UI. I don't think saying any later generation made it "come of age" makes that much sense, apart from the move to support Windows users as well which was key to growth.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The only issue was that if one used the flip to answer option, the early models did not allow a caller ID.
That was not the only issue. Not by a long shot.
I had the RAZR for a few years, near the end of its lifespan in the market (I replaced it with the original iPhone). In my time with the RAZR the only credit I would give it is that it survived be thrown across the room in sheer frustration three times. Sturdy, yes. But here's the things I hated:
1) Keypad. Almost unreadable and the slant of the keys made it almost impossible to use by touch.
2) It's a flip phone but not really. You see, the advantage of flip phones (and why I bought a RAZR) is that you cannot accidentally press buttons on them while closed. I forget exactly what the many side buttons on the RAZR did, but they were cause for at least one of the aforementioned room flingings. They would often do something undesirable if you simply reached your hand in your pocket to answer a call - mercifully the exact memories are foggy.
3) The user interface was beyond horrible. It was a "smart phone" of the kind that made the iPhone so necessary to build. I'm a very technical user being a programmer, but I found it way too inconvenient to actually load contacts onto the phone much less anything else, and we all know how browsing was on these ancient devices...
I was far happier with my previous time owning a featureless bar phone than I ever was with my RAZR. But yes it looked and felt great. In that way it was everything Apple Haters always accuse Apple products of being, the ultimate in style over substance.
I'll not deny them a spot on the list because they did alter the mobile landscape, but I sure did hate that phone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I do believe that the writers at engadget have shown gross negligence for overlooking the significance of this decade's most important gadget: The Fleshlight.
No more best/worst of the decade stuff! No more, I tell you!
And you people pissing about the decade really ending next year- you people are worse! Look up the "astronomical calendar" already! French astronomers fixed the issue back in the 1700s by defining a year zero.
Argh! Hiss! Spit!
OK, better now. :)
The Nokia N900 is the first { Linux + X11 + phone } that works nicely (OpenMoko was a poor attempt), and it's Debian based! (Maemo).
The greatest gadget for the decade, I think, was one made before it. The Messagepad 2100. I bought mine in 2001 used, and I still use it as the best note taking device I have yet to find outside of paper and pen. How many computer products have a ten plus year following with active use in day to day life?
Agreed for the GPS they're now common as muck, and I'm basically considered a troglodyte for not having one in the car.
Being so happy to be rid of the dreaded diskette collection, I personally would have included the now ubiquitous, and often free, USB keychain storage device. Software installation and document transfer are a cinch compared to what they were, without even mentioning song swapping.
What about the webcam? This has revolutionized communications and activity scheduling - want to see what the ski slopes look like today - check out the weather to the west - webcams galore. Sure, they existed before, but buying one for your granma to chat to her grandkids wasn't an option before either.
The boys at engadget clearly don't match my memories, cause I would have pinned the smokeless pipe, or cannabis vaporiser, as one of the best gadgets made popular this decade too. Then again, they included WinXP, so I don't want whatever shit they're smoking anyway.
The one gadget that DID define the decade.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"... downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends"
There's something wrong with this guy.
I cannot agree with X360. It's a great console. PS2 was too. But only Wii brings a new fresh air to videogames. It's not the same (just more power to graphics), it's a whole new concept (hardware AND software): target to people that never played a game OR old gamers that lost videogames tasting. I know here and gadgets sites are filled by geeks like us (love hardware power), so I can understand that X360 or PS2 are a natural vote. But in a world perspective, it's not the videogame of the decade.
Let's just take a look at the items which definitely don't belong on the list. At the top of the "who are you kidding" list is probably the Powerbook G4. A look at the sales numbers alone would be sufficient to disqualify it. Apple didn't gain any notable market share until they went intel. Giving XP and OSX the same spot is hilarious, but I guess it makes some sense; this is the decade that the mass market operating systems gained some real functionality. The Treo is a fail, though, on the same basis as the Powerbook G4. There's really no room for it on a list with iPod and iPhone, both of which honestly deserve the position more for simply bringing the functionality to the masses, most especially unlike the Treo. The Xbox 360 clearly does not deserve the Wii's place; as others have pointed out, only the PS2 has really had more impact, due to being an early and acceptable DVD player. And why the EEE 900, and not the 701? Oh, because the 900 was aimed at housewives. But (if you don't give the credit to Psion) you have to laud the 701 for basically launching the idea of the netbook as a valid product.
Some other gadgets that might deserve the credit include the Gameboy Advance SP (2003) which took advantage of the insurgence of video game popularity but which also came in a new-old form factor that made it acceptable to carry around in your pocket, and brought mobile gaming to the masses; it paved the way for Sony's PSP (2004), which does not belong on the list because it is so retarded and because GBA sales own it. Not including a personal navigation system is, as others have pointed out, patently retarded; this is the decade where "everyone" got navigation. You can get a tolerably credible unit for fifty bucks, or something with fairly up to date maps for around a hundred. I would say that one of the gadgets of the decade is the game console guitar, too; the success of the Hero series of musical games has been nothing less than epic.
My favorite gadget of this decade is coil-on-plug ignition, but that's a different list. It wasn't invented in this decade, but this is when it's finally becoming popular. Distributors suck and waste spark systems take up too much space.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The article was written by grown men with the minds of emotionally limited 12-year-old girls.
... the highest failure rate"
The Razr phone was not sealed. Dust got into the display.
From one of the comments posted to the story, about Microsoft quality: "... the 360 made history
More Microsoft quality -- Windows XP: It was 3 years until service pack 2 made Windows XP a version that was relatively finished.
Actual quote from the article: "From my suitcase cell phone in the 1980s to my Nokia brick in the 1990s to my Palm in the early 2000s to my beloved BlackBerry to the iPhone, these have been my most satisfying relationships ever. Yes, I am a loser."
'... the self-styled "core gamer," '
"... the feeling I had as I was preparing our iPhone announcement post -- my heart was pounding"
The writers need relationships with people.
I noticed they gave the Blackberry an honorable mention and its own article, but it should have been on this top 10 list.
Just saying.
I fail to see why people should stop working if a file server fails.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How decades are counted is a bloody convention, not a law of nature.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This compilation is really short-sighted, though they seem to have gotten a few things right.
I definitely agree, though, that the RAZR did a lot to force manufacturers to slim their phones, despite it being a pretty mediocre phone on its own. I also agree that the Treo 650 was basically responsible for putting smartphones on the map for most people, though the Blackberry popularized push e-mail to the point of making it an expectancy for most people nowadays.
Engadget? I'm going to go out on a limb and make a wild guess: 6 out of the 10 are Apple products, and the only Microsoft product will be presented only in comparison to an Apple product.
Xbox won't make it but Wii will.
The USB flash drive won't be on the list because there's no brand name for them to pimp.
You are welcome on my lawn.
no, at 25 dec 10 he became 9 years old
Actually, calendar changes notwithstandig, a quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that the one thing that can be stated with certanty is that he wasn't born in 1AD, so arguing over a +/- 1 year discrepancy is kinda futile.
(Not to mention the difficulty of being born on a fixed calendar date and dying on a date determined by the phase of the moon).
That's assuming that he isn't just a gestalt of various prophets and political figures...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
More soberly, I would say the IED is the gadget that most "defined the decade" as Engadget's headline touts.
Well, you got one out of four predictions right. Better than average for slashdot.
It has only been out a month in 2009. But is's cross between a mobile computer and a VOIP/CELL phone, it's design, it's open Maemo5 (linux OS), everything will put it in a new catagory that the press just has not yet defined. It is a true milestone in computer history along with the like of the Altair 8080, SORD IS-11, Kaypro-II, etc.
Just a little late in the game, but still in 2009.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
"Windows XP brought the entire Windows family onto the vastly more stable NT kernel" ------- I thought Windows 2000 used the NT kernel before XP.
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
LCD Technology
Wireless G
HDTV
H.264
Multi-Core technology
LED
Bluetooth
3G
Cable Modems/DSL Broadband technology
Note that some of these existed in early forms prior to 2000, but they took new directions, or simply took off for the consumer in the last decade.
I'm picturing your parent poster as some Roman nerd yelling at everybody that they shouldn't be celebrating the onset of Year 10 since Jesus Christ was born only nine years ago.
And I'm picturing an older, wiser Roman tapping him on the shoulder and pointing out that:
1) They're not using the birth of Jesus as the basis of their time system yet.
2) When the A.D. system is implemented, it will be miscalculated and land the birth of Jesus in 4 A.D.
3) Jesus wasn't born at midnight on January 1st. And the winter solstice isn't at that time either. So it's clear that the moment chosen to increment the year counter is arbitrary anyway.
4) If we use your definition of "decade", then what are we going to call the decade that includes the year 1985 A.D.? "I Love The 80's Including 1990 But Not 1980"?
Agreed but I'd go one step further: I can see the Ipod (it's the most popular mp3 player by far), but not the Iphone. It wasn't the first phone to combine PDA and phone features as they think - that happened long before, and was commonplace on even feature phones, which could access the real Internet and run apps by 2005 or earlier. It certainly wasn't the first smartphone (even their own list includes earlier examples), nor was it the phone to transform them "from niche accessories into must-have status symbols" as they allege. With only a few per cent market share even now, and far fewer sales with the original Iphone, how could they? Instead try Nokia at 40% market share, who have done far more to bring smartphones to the masses. (It's debatable whether the Iphone, especially the first model, counts as a smartphone anyway, and not a feature phone.)
If they're including it because it combined a phone with the Ipod, then that's double counting since the Ipod already has a place (and by 2007, or even 2005, playing mp3s on phones was commonplace).
Then we have the nonsense of "full touch is the new black, finger-friendly UIs are virtually required, and world-class industrial design is a given. The game has changed." - yeah, because obviously no one would have introduced touch if Apple hadn't done it (the reality is that Apple weren't first, and it was an obvious improvement that everyone would want once the technology was perfected and cheap enough), and having good looking phones was a feature long before Apple came to the game late.
It's particularly bizarre, and shows how lacking in facts the article is, when the inset starts "3G changed everything" - yet 3G became commonplace in 2005, while the first Iphone in 2007 still didn't have basic features like 3G.
It ends with the laughable nonsense of "introduced the mass market to the mobile internet. Apple single handedly jumpstarted the mobile applications market while simultaneously re-defining the carrier and handset vendor relationship." Please! The basic facts are that most of the mass of the market are accessing the mobile internet through methods other than Apple. And that's before we take account of all the people who are using netbooks and 3G dongles (which Apple have no presence in whatsoever).
Indeed, if we're going to credit someone for introducing mobile broadband, what about the phone networks and 3G?
Jumpstarting the mobile applications market is nonsense - native apps were common long before Apple, and if anyone deserves real credit here, it should be Java by allowing a cross-platform standard that two billion Java phones can all run.
At least they do mention other earlier non-Apple phones, but for the later generation, I'd expect to see something from a company like Nokia. They already mention the Palm Treo, and stuff Blackberry and Android as "Honorable mentions" - why does the Iphone deserve its own entry? And on that note, why does no Nokia phone, the most dominant smartphone company in the world, even get a mention?
Lame list if I do say so myself. I would think that a gaming console, namely the Nintendo Wii, would be seen as a gadget that defined the decade. Yeah the graphics aren't high-end, but I'll bet that most people reading this post own one. The Wii innovated and brought families and friends closer together. They defied their critics in a time that demanded faster, better, prettier looking games. Instead they thought outside of the box (pun intended) and did something new that their competitors would eventually copy and try to improve upon. Also, Apple products seem to be ubiquitous in TFA along with the word ubiquitous. WTF?
This signature has The Force
I believe Apple is the most innovative company of the decade.
This gadget did quite a bit to define the decade as well.
Cheers!
Sean
...a "Top 10" website that doesn't make you wade through ten pages of ads. Nice work.
rj
Back in 1999, the world was finally becoming a civilized place. The Soviet Union was gone, 40 years of nuclear terrorism were over, and we were in the trailing edge of a long technology boom even though most of us realized that selling dogfood online might not be an entirely sustainable business model :-)
Two years later the world was going to Hell.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Which is in a year from now. One more year for you to try to understand that.
Can I already place bets on what year the mainstream media will call the end of the next decade?
Captcha: throbs, which is what the pain in my head does like when people don't understand basic math.
CRT is short for
Cathode
Ray
Tube
so CRT Tubes does not make sense. Just like why would Chewbacca, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, live on Endor with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks?
Let me clarify myself on this. If you look at the 1G to 3G iPods, note on the 1G and 2G model they had buttons surround the "wheel," and the 3G had buttons above the "wheel." It was with the 4G iPod (using an idea borrowed from the iPod mini) that 1) Apple got rid of the additional buttons and 2) switched to USB 2.0 as the primary way to interface the iPod with a computer.
I see what you mean now, because clicking is basically "on the wheel" from then on. That does make sense (although I think I would argue in favor of the design with a physical wheel surrounded by buttons, but that does not scale in size as well I think and is worse in terms of durability).
But I still don't really see the benefit of not supporting both, as they used to do (I think the 2G and up had the dock). All USB seemed more a cost savings than anything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They've been around for 70+ years. Killed more people in WW2 and Vietnam than they did in this decade.
Somebody called this 'lazy journalism' where the writer comes up with a list (10 best/10 worst ad
infinitum) without having to disclose anything that you didn't already know. They usually pop up at
year's end.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Also, those gadgets have a very closed circle of users.
Calling that a "gadget that defined a decade" is kinda like referring to a Zune in the same way.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens