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 (Internet Explorer 8), Mozilla (Firefox) and, most notably, Google (Chrome).
And Netflix, the company that built a business shipping DVDs by mail, began letting you instantly stream movies on a whole bunch of hardware components — from a clever $100 box from Roku to certain Blu-ray players.
Blu-ray itself was something of a story, if only because 2008 began with Hollywood choosing it as the preferred format for next-generation high-definition DVDs. For all the predictions about digital distribution of entertainment winning out long term — Netflix being one example — physical media will stick around for a while. By the end of the year, Blu-ray players were heavily discounted. I found one for less than $200 on Black Friday and would like to see prices drop even further.
This is the time of year when pundits reflect on the previous 12 months. I’ve been poring through a year’s worth of products I tested for my Personal Technology columns. I’m also paying homage, if not quite breaking into a sweat, over some of the influential products I didn’t actually review. For example, the Wii Fit exercise board from Nintendo helped the company continue to bulk up sales for its widely popular Wii video game system. I’ve also been gazing into my crystal ball. At least two tech stories are likely to dominate headlines in 2009.
On Feb. 17, television as we’ve known it since Howdy Doody will be altered forever. That’s when…