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."

Comments

The iPod?

[Anonymous Coward]

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Re:Put the gadgets in the summary!

[thenextstevejobs]

I'll bite

Since you cant be troubled, the list is as following:

Rock Band

Tony Hawk: Ride

Wii

Wacom tablet

iPhone

Johnny 5

UTF-8

The Internet

Debian Etch

RIAA universal communication surveillance

Re:360?

[0xdeadbeef]

But not the console of the decade, not by a long shot.

There's still 23 hours left for the PS3 to outsell it! Go, fanboys, go!

Re:360?

[TheLink]

The Red Ring of Death may still be remembered well into the next decade.

IMO that's about the most memorable and defining thing about the xbox 360 ;).

FWIW, "exploding" batteries from various gadgets were rather more common in this decade than previous decades.

Re:XP and OS X?

[Ihmhi]

I tend to think of a widget as more of a little (computer) desktop thing like a clock or calender. XP and OSX are really more like highly-evolved Widgets.

Widgeotto? Widgeot, even.

Re:The decade isn't over yet!

[originalTMAN]

You're a hardware engineer, aren't you. :)

Re:Put the gadgets in the summary!

[_merlin]

WTF are "Johnny 5" and "Debian Etch"? If I'm too lazy to RTFA, you shouldn't expect me to have to look up what the items on the list are. ;)

Re:XP and OS X?

[Hurricane78]

Well, they don’t need to be physical. But they are definitely toys.

XP for the drooling Playmobil playing retard.
OSX for the gay hipster designer. ;)

Box Cutter?

[cpuffer_hammer]

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).

This list is leaving out the most important gadget

[scourfish]

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.

Re:The decade isn't over yet!

[itsdapead]

You're a hardware engineer, aren't you. :)

No - if he was he'd understand about appropriate precision and wouldn't be arguing about a +/-1 year error on a datum point only known to the nearest 30 years or so...

Also, there may not have been a "0 AD" but, equally, there wasn't a 1AD, 2AD, etc. - at least not that people knew about at the time - since the numbering system wasn't devised until the sixth century.

So while you've worked out that a Roman coin with the date "52 BC" is probably a fake, I'm afraid your special souveneir "review of the noulghty-noulghties" edition of the i>Galillee Times dated "AD 11"is a bit iffy, too...

Re:Simple Simon games

[mister_playboy]

but simply by spending more money than your opponent?

It's worked out well for the NY Yankees, and they seem pretty popular. ;)

Re:XP and OS X?

[Quirkz]

On the other hand, the word "backronym" is an example of the twenty-first century tendency to benniferize things. This word blending is also sometimes known as a brangelinaism.