10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of the Year from the New York Times
So many of those year-end articles sound really dated when you give them a couple of months to ferment. How did this New York Times article age over the last two months?
Here’s what they gave a good rating for 2005:
The SanDisk Ultra II SD Plus card: It’s an SD card with a USB jack built right in. For those of you with computers without card readers, this is a great choice, but is it worth the extra cost? Since this 512MB card costs as much as a normal 2GB card, I doubt it. Card readers are cheap and easily add into your computer tower or plug into a USB port. This one is a cool idea, but not worth the extra bucks.
The Palm Treo 700W cellphone: For those of you too absentminded to remember which number deletes the voicemail and which number saves it, Palm created an on-screen voicemail with buttons that are like a VCR. Just a warning, this is a Windows Mobile Palm device, so if you already have a Palm, none of your software will work on this cellphone.
Hewlett-Packard’s latest microdisplay (rear projection) TV: Instead of attaching all your gadgets to your television at the back, HP has created an illuminated panel at the front. The article is unclear about how the cords are hidden or if they just sit there, out in the open. I like to imagine that in the future, there will be one gadget that records your television shows, plays your DVDs and entertains you with games, so that the connection to the television is one, simple cord. Why they didn’t choose the HP Media PC instead of the HP TV with the “cord monitor†is beyond me.
Canon Powershot S80 8MP Digital Camera: They made a good choice with this one. They liked this camera because it can shoot video at 1024 x 768 pixels (instead of 640 by 480 pixels, like most cameras that have video built in). This means you can crop a single frame from your video and use it as a really good photo. The only problem with this is that it’s NOT a video camera, so you don’t have the control like you would with real video and your storage media can fill up mighty fast at 1024 x 768 pixels. I would have chosen the anti-shake technology in the Panasonic digital cameras because it opens up photography to a large group of people and occasions (such as trying to take a picture on a vibrating motor boat).
The Video iPod: To be able to watch your favorite television shows whenever you want and wherever you want is a great freedom. Apple and their video iPod brought that to the world in 2005 and the New York Times was right, it is a great idea. The video iPod would have been useless if Apple hadn’t set up the ability to download television to it, however. Kudos to Apple for waiting to add the video playback ability to their iPods until they were able to support it properly.
The outer button on flip phones: This one is the most confusing of them all. I had an outer button on my StarTac flip phone from Motorola where I could answer or dismiss a call without opening the flip all the way back in 2000. I didn’t have a cool LCD screen on the front to see who was calling, but this “new†idea of 2005 isn’t even new. Bad call, New York Times…
So, what do you think? Two months after they first posted this list, do these ideas really seem all that great? Some of them are. I would have chosen differently on others. Of course, you can get twenty people together and you would have twenty different lists for the greatest gadget ideas of the year. What would you choose?