Archive for the ‘awards’ Category

The Mobile Decade: Greatest Gadgets From 10 Years of Innovation

Others may look back on the years 2000 to 2009 and remember elections, wars, global warming and Michael Jackson, but for gearheads like us, this was the decade that mobile tech grew up.

During the first decade of the 21st century, we saw a whole slew of new mobile technologies capture the public imagination: the smartphone, the MP3 player, the USB stick, touchscreens, Wi-Fi, 3G wireless, pocket camcorders, digital SLRs and more.

Thanks to these inventions, people got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence. Where we stand now, notebooks outsell desktop PCs, people spend more on mobile phones than on landlines, and portable game consoles outnumber the ones plugged into your TV cabinet.

The products on this list exemplify that trend. While not every gadget here is portable (and many of them are gaming consoles — sorry, we can’t help it if the most exciting hardware innovations are poured into the videogame industry), the arc of the decade clearly reflects an increasingly mobile world.

From the PlayStation 2 to the Kindle 2, what follows are the best gadgets of each year in the “aughts.”

2000: PlayStation 2

Console gaming in the late 1990s kind of sucked. Sure, there was the Nintendo 64, the Sega Dreamcast and, of course, the original Sony PlayStation. But none of these rigs possessed the trifecta of deep game libraries, awesome graphics and multimedia functionality.

Then, at the turn of the millennium, Sony dropped a 100-megaton bomb it dubbed PlayStation 2.

Rich catalog of fun titles? Check. Top-notch graphics? Double-check. Multimedia functionality. Hello, hat trick. The PS2 also flaunted backward compatibility for OG PlayStation games, and it had easily upgradeable memory. Even mass shortages at launch couldn’t hamper the system’s popularity: Folks shelled out more than a thousand bucks for them on eBay.

A decade later the PS2 is the highest selling console in history with more than 138 million units sold. And it’s still growing, even though it’s technically obsolete. Case redesigns, price drops and seemingly unstoppable game-library expansion have virtually assured that the console will remain fresh for years to come. Hell, we just might ask Santa for a slimline PS2 this year. – Daniel Dumas

Nobel Physics prize goes to creators of the CCD, fiber optic communications

With all the hoopla lately about the Nobel Peace prize, you might have missed the fact that there was another Nobel prize given away this week: the Nobel Prize In Physics. This significantly geekier prize was actually awarded to two separate inventions, both of which are extremely significant.

So here’s how it breaks down. Two separate prizes were given out, and the winners will split the award (but probably not the medal). The first winner was Charles K. Kao, the man who is responsible for some of the most groundbreaking developments in the use of fiber optics in communication. So essentially, he made it possible for me to be doing the job that I’m doing today.

The other half of the prize was awarded to two co-recipients, Willard Boyle and George Smith. These two gentlemen worked at Bell Labs in the late 1960’s, and were responsible for developing the CCD device, which is of course used in digital cameras and other devices. The award was given to Boyle and Smith not because of the CCD’s use in digital cameras, but for it’s use in medical devices and research, and not necessarily for it’s use in taking your family vacation shots.

So there you have it. While the Peace prize may have been a controversial choice, I doubt anyone would have issue with who received the Physics prize.

[via DPReview]