There was no landslide winner as the most important tech product of 2008. But amidst the most challenging economic storm in decades, you could make a case for viable candidates. Smartphones, especially Apple’s iPhone 3G, got smarter, buoyed by the brand-new iTunes App Store. Portable and inexpensive laptops, dubbed “netbooks,” got smaller, cheaper and more ubiquitous. There were innovative, if imperfect, new Web browsers from Microsoft, Mozilla and, most notably, Google.
