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How about the clockwork radio? Or GPS? Or a pocket calculator? All these things are useful to real people, not just PC magazine editors. |
Are the people who created this list insane ? Surely the most important gadget of the modern age is the mobile phone? It has revolutionalised communication, which is more than can be said for a niche market laptop. From outside the modern age, the marine chronometer is the single most important gadget, without which modern transportation systems would not have evolved so quickly. |
Has everyone forgot about the Breville pie maker?? |
An interesting list. Of the electronic gadgets, thousands of journalists in the early 1980s blessed the original noteboook pc - the Tandy 100. The size of A4 paper and light, three weeks on a set of batteries, an excellent keyboard, a modem. A pity Tandy did not make it DOS compatible. |
What's an Apple Powerbook 100 ? It's out of date - not much of a "gadget". Surely it has to be something simple / timeless - the tin opener, Swiss Army Knife, safety razor blade, wristwatch or the thing for taking stones out of horses hooves ? |
It has to be the mobile phone. No other single device has had such an effect on our way of living in such a short space of time. |
The ball point pen has got to be one of the most used and common gadgets ever. Also many might be grateful for the pocket calculator which was a great improvement over the slide rule. |
The Casio pocket calculator that played a simple game and made tinny noises was also a hot gadget in 1980. A true gadget, it could be carried around and shown off. |
All top 10 are electronic toys, so the list is probably a better reflection of the current high-tech obsession than anyhting else. I say this as the Swiss Army Knife only made No 20. |
Sinclair QL a machine far ahead of its time. The first home machine with a true multi-takings OS. Shame the marketing was so bad!!! |
Apple.. a triumph of fashion over... well everything else. |
Utter rubbish. Yes, the Apple laptop and Sony Walkman are classic gadgets. But to call the sextant and the marine chronometer 'gadgets' and rank them as less important than a TV remote control reveals a quite shocking lack of historical perspective. The former literally helped change the world by vastly improving navigation at see. The latter is the seed around which the couch potato culture has developed. No competition. |
I'd also put Apple's Newton and the first Palm Pilot there as the front runners for portable computing, and possibly the Toshiba Libretto for the same reason. I only wish that Vulcan Inc's Flipstart wasn't just vapourware otherwise it would be at the top. |
How did a laptop ever manage to beat off the challenge of the wristwatch or the telephone (mobile or otherwise)? What about radios and TVs? |
The swiss army knife. By far the most useful gadget. I got mine 12 years ago. Still wearing and using it a lot! It stood the test of time. |
Psion Organiser series 3, should be up there. Had a usable qwerty keyboard, removable storage, good set of apps and programmable. Case design was good (batteries in the hinge - a first, I think). Great product innovation. |
The first mobile PC was voted best gadget by readers of...err... mobile PC?! Why do you keep putting these obviously biased lists on your site? It's obviously the mobile phone or remote control, and readers of a less partisan publication would tell you that. |
The Motorola Startac should be Number One. Why? There will be mobile phones long after notebook computers and other gadgets are either gone or integrated in communications devices. |
The Psion series 3c! The first most practical way to carry all your info around... |
I too would back the Sinclair Spectrum - without this little beauty I would never have moved into the world of IT and earn the living that I do now. |
I'd have put the mobile phone high up the list. Probably a Nokia model. |
Sinclair Spectrum - 16k. It plugged into the tv. Games were rubbish but it gave me a taste for programming and that's what I do for a living now. |
I wish more modern notebooks -- even Apple's newest offerings -- were more like the PB100. Particularly disheartening is the demise of the trackball, which has given way to the largely useless "trackpad" which every notebook on the market today uses. They're invariably inaccurate, uncomfortable, and cumbersome to use. |
Congratulations to Apple, a deserved win! |
PlayStation Vita was the original Switch Lite, and it deserves a comeback |
Commentary: I dug up Sony's last handheld, and it still holds up. Imagine a new one. |
Quick, come with me in my video game time machine! The year is 2012. It's a different world here. Obama is the president. The Olympics were in London. Nintendo just released its newest handheld, the 3DS, a year ago. The Nintendo Wii is around, but losing steam with the Wii U around the corner. It's still the era of the PS3 and Xbox 360; the PS4 and Xbox One are a year away. And a little Sony gaming handheld with a big screen had just arrived. |
If you're holding a Nintendo Switch right now, put it down: I'm here to talk about the PlayStation Vita... because it's sitting right in front of me on my desk. And looking at it again, I'm wondering why Sony's handheld hasn't been readying a comeback. |
In February of 2012, the PlayStation Vita arrived in the US. It was another big handheld moonshot from Sony, an attempt to recapture the glory that was the pre-iPhone PSP. The PSP was Sony's first shoot-for-the-moon gaming handheld, which played little Universal Media Discs and came before the iPod even played video. The Vita was a smartphone-age game handheld that tried to up the game further: It had an OLED touchscreen. It had a front and rear camera. It had a touchpad on its back! The whole thing seemed futuristic. |
The Vita met its end in 2018, pretty much. Sony had already announced its demise that year, with production ending in 2019. I never wrote a eulogy for it. But in the months I've been stuck inside my house, digging up everything that's stacked in various sedimentary layers, I found a Vita Slim: a later, lighter LCD model. It charges with Micro-USB. I turned it on. It needed updates, but it worked. |
Movie body targets children's PCs |
The body that represents the US movie industry has released its latest tool in its campaign to clamp down on movie file-sharing, aimed at parents. |
The Movie Association for America's (MPAA) free Parent File Scan software lets parents check their children's computers for peer-to-peer programs. It will also list all movie and music files they have on their hard drive. Parents then have the choice to remove programs and files. The MPAA said files found would not be passed on to it. "Our ultimate goal is to help consumers locate the resources and information they need to make appropriate decisions about using and trading illegal files," said Dan Glickman, MPAA chief. "Many parents are concerned about what their children have downloaded and where they've downloaded it from." |
But some computer users who had tested the latest software reported on some technology sites that the program had identified Windows default wav files as copyrighted material and wanted to delete them. Movie piracy cost the industry £3.7bn ($7bn) in 2003, according to analysts. The MPAA said in a statement that it would continue to provide easy access to similar tools in the coming months to combat "the deleterious effects of peer-to-peer software, including such common problems as viruses, Trojan horses and identity theft". |
Mr Glickman said that the film industry was embracing "digital age technologies", like Movielink and CinemaNow, which are legal movie sites. "But legal services such as these need a chance to grow and thrive without having to compete against illegitimate operations that depend on stolen property to survive," he added. The industry body also said it had launched a second round of legal action against online movie-swappers across the US, but did not say how many were being sued. Its first set of lawsuits were filed in November 2004. It also started a campaign against operators of BitTorrent, eDonkey and DirectConnect peer-to-peer networks. The first convictions for peer-to-peer piracy were handed out in the US in January. William Trowbridge and Michael Chicoine pleaded guilty to charges that they infringed copyright by illegally sharing music, movies and software. |
Galaxy S10 Plus vs. iPhone XS Max, Pixel 3 XL: All specs compared |
See how Samsung's behemoth Galaxy S10 Plus stacks up against its Apple and Android rivals spec by spec. |
On Wednesday at its Unpacked event in San Francisco, Samsung launched the Galaxy S10 Plus -- the larger brother to the Galaxy S10. The phone was one of four new phones announced including the Galaxy S10 5G and the "cheaper" S10E. Unlike the Galaxy Fold, none of these phones fold in half. The Galaxy S10 Plus has a 6.4-inch AMOLED screen with two front-facing cameras housed in a double hole-punch cut-out that Samsung calls the Galaxy O display. Like the Galaxy S10, it has a fingerprint reader built under the display, but unlike the smaller Galaxy, the S10 Plus has dual cameras on the front for selfies. |
The Galaxy S10 Plus is -- on paper -- the most powerful Android phone. But it has to contend with Apple's iPhone XS Max with its blazing fast A12 processor. It's also up against the Google Pixel 3 XL, which has one of the best cameras on any phone today and is $100 cheaper. |
The future in your pocket |
If you are a geek or gadget fan, the next 12 months look like they are going to be a lot of fun. |
The relentless pace of development in the hi-tech world and rampant competition in many of its sectors, particularly among mobile phone firms, all suggests that 2005 is going to be a very good year. To begin with, 2005 will be the year that third-generation (3G) mobile phones become inescapable. The 3 network launched in 2003, Vodafone launched its consumer service in November, Orange followed in early December and T-Mobile and O2 are due to launch in 2005. The main result of these launches will likely be a slew of good deals for consumers as operators try to poach new customers from rivals and convince existing users to trade up. |
Already the extra capacity in 3G networks lets 3 offer good deals on voice calls at rates that will probably have to be matched by the other operators. But the shift in technology and low cost of voice calls means that operators lose a significant chunk of their revenue. "Show me an operator that believes their voice business can sustain them, and I'll write their obituary" said Niel Ransom, chief technology officer at Alcatel. |
Instead operators are likely to push all other things that 3G phones can do such as video messaging and other multimedia capabilities. Already camera phones look set to challenge digital cameras and are likely to win more fans as multi-megapixel devices go on sale. But 3G will not have everything its own way. It will face competition from emerging technologies such as Wimax. This wireless technology can boost data transmission speeds up to 75 megabits per second and works over distances of up to 30 miles. Kent is likely to be the site of the UK's first Wimax network which is due to go live in 2005 and it could be the way that rural areas get high-speed net access. Analyst firm Telecom View predicts that Wimax will steal a lot of market share from 3G and will be a clear winner. Bob Larribeau, principal analyst at Telecom View, said the better return on investment offered by technologies such as Wimax could dent the possible returns of 3G networks. And the growing ubiquity of wi-fi must not be forgotten either. The technology is popping up in more places than ever and its wider use is only held back by the price differences across countries and suppliers. |
Moves to unite mobile and fixed phones look set to get more emphasis in 2005 too. |
For a start, BT looks set to roll out its Bluephone project during the next 12 months. The service revolves around a hybrid device that uses the mobile networks when you are out and about but switches back to the fixed line when you are at home. Fixed line phones will also start to get much more serious competition from a technology that has the formidable name of Voice over IP (Voip). Voip routes calls via the net instead of the fixed line phone network. Anyone with a broadband connection, which is now more than 50% of the UK's net using population, can use Voip and could slash their monthly phone bills if they used it. Telecommunications regulator Ofcom has declared 056 to be the area code for Voip calls and 2005 is likely to see a lot more consumer-focused Voip call services starting up. Home broadband services will also start to increase in speed as dwindling numbers of new users signing force the pace of competition. If 2004 has been the year of the portable music player, they 2005 looks like it will be the year of the portable media player. Motorola has just announced a deal with Apple to produce a phone that works with the iTunes service and other hybrid gadgets that sport a big memory and lots of other functions will become commonplace. The pace of advancement in storage media will continue mean that the cost per megabyte of memory will plummet. Some of those devices will sport huge hard drives letting you store more data than you ever wanted or knew you had. Convergence could mean that single-function devices start to dwindle in number. Instead every gadget will be able to do almost anything and communicate almost any way you want. The only downside is that consumers will face a series of tough choices as they are confronted by a bewildering array of gadgets each with an enormous numbers of features and vast data holding capacities. But that is the kind of problem most gadget fans can live with. |
2021 Acura TLX vs. Audi A4, BMW 330i, Mercedes C300, Volvo S60: How these AWD sedans stack up |
The battle of the premium all-wheel drive sedans heats up with the debut of Acura's updated TLX. |
The Acura TLX certainly has its fans, but over the years it (and its predecessors) have struggled for legitimacy against the established premium European competition. The new 2021 TLX that officially debuted Thursday aims to change that with sharp physicality and a promising pair of turbocharged engine options. Let's see how Acura's new sport sedan stacks up against the premium competition. |
The usual suspects are here: Audi's newly announced 2021 A4, the BMW 330i, the Mercedes-Benz C300 and we're also including the Volvo S60, another underdog in this class. Like the Audi and the Volvo, the 2021 TLX features standard front-wheel drive; the Bimmer and Benz send their power to the rear. All five sedans are available with optional all-wheel-drive, so we'll be looking at those configurations to level the playing field. |
Powertrain |
The upcoming TLX Type S is certainly exciting with its 3.0-liter turbo V6, but Acura hasn't yet announced details or specs for that model, so we'll have to circle back on that comparo later. For now, let's focus on the standard powertrain: a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder mated to a 10-speed automatic transmission. This is the same VTEC turbo engine found in Acura's RDX crossover, with 272 horsepower and 280 pound-feet of torque. In this presumably lighter chassis, it should feel more responsive. |
The TLX claims "the highest horsepower in its core competitive set," according to Acura, and technically that's true. The A4, 3 Series and C300 are all members of the around-250-horsepower club. However, for this all-wheel-drive comparison, we have to look at the Volvo S60 T6 AWD which -- with its supercharged and turbocharged engine -- raises the bar to 316 ponies. If you're feeling the need for speed, maybe check out the Swede. |
Acura has not stated fuel economy estimates for the new-generation TLX, but we can make an educated guess based on the RDX's numbers. The crossover is good for 21 city, 27 highway and 23 combined miles per gallon. In the sedan's presumably lighter chassis, we should expect slightly better numbers. |
It'll need that extra efficiency to ascend from its previous spot near the bottom of the pile. The Volvo S60, the most powerful of the bunch, is (for now) the least efficient competitor with 21 city mpg, 32 highway mpg and 25 mpg combined -- still better than the 2019 TLX. Slightly better is the Mercedes-Benz C300 at 26 combined mpg. Audi hasn't released numbers for its 2021 A4, but we don't think it'll be too far off of the 2020 model's 27 combined mpg. |
The current king of the hill is the BMW 330i xDrive at 25 city, 34 highway and 28 combined mpg. Frankly, we don't think the Acura will beat that, but if the TLX manages to land in the middle of the pack, it'll still be a solid step up over last year. |
The TLX's new look -- based on the Type S concept -- is wrapped around a new platform that is longer and wider than before. The wheelbase also stretches to 113.0 inches, a gain of 3.7 inches. Interestingly, the roof sits 0.6-inch lower (56.4) than last year, which contributes to the wide and low look. |
The TLX is now the longest model in this roundup, measuring over 7 inches longer than the next longest Audi A4 and over 10 inches longer than the C-Class. The Acura's 113-inch wheelbase is also one of the longest in the class. Acura's TLX has long straddled the size spectrum between these compact sedans and their midsize counterparts. |
Subsets and Splits