The Best, the Worst, and the Ugliest: 2008

Product of the year runners-up: There are many nifty netbook choices around, with more coming soon -- an array of 8.9-, 10-, and 12-inch screens; hard drives and solid-state drives; Linux and Windows; and near-desktop or near-impossible typing experiences, depending on keyboard size. Most radical of all, in 2009, there may even be some that use an AMD or VIA or Freescale instead of Intel's Atom processor.

Our August writeup wasn't the only rave review of the Acer Aspire One. The colorfully cased 8.9-inch compact made Acer the #1 netbook seller, edging Asus despite the latter's spreading its pioneering Eee brand across a slew of models. And while not a few netbook contenders missed the whole point of being under three pounds and under $500, Acer stayed on track, even slipping a last-minute $300 configuration under Christmas trees.

Our other runner-up? Call it the netbook's kissing cousin, or call it an obvious pick: If HardwareCentral wasn't proudly PC-centric, it'd be hard to avoid naming Apple's iPhone 3G as product of the year.

Sure, when the iPhone first debuted, we were prepared to dismiss the touch-screen interface as mere glamour and glitz before finding it, uh, pretty cool and addictive. (We did the same thing with the HP TouchSmart IQ506 desktop, the only PC rad enough to lure an iMac user to the Dark Side.)

But it's the combination of ease of use, a tolerable price tag, an avalanche of apps, and mobile broadband that makes the iP3G the first mass-market realization of the connected-everywhere, all-your-info-always-with-you lifestyle we've been reading about in Time and Popular Science since the '60s.

From now on, you're going to have either a smartphone or a netbook -- depending on your preference for keyboard input -- that will give you access to all the local- and/or Web-based data and applications you expect from your desktop. And you'll buy it from your wireless carrier instead of a hardware vendor. We were talking about the Aspire One? Radio Shack is now selling it for $100 with a 3G modem card and a two-year AT&T data contract.

Back to breakout hits of the year: Sorry, we got so sidetracked with netbooks and mobile Internet devices we almost forgot to make this year's prediction. What will be sizzling hot in 2009? Two words: Three D.

Let your fingers do the walking: Remember two-inch-thick desktop keyboards, tilted even higher by prop-up feet on their bottoms? Today it's much more chic, not to mention ergonomic, to flaunt a flat, ultra-low-profile keyboard. The HP TouchSmart's keyboard (now available separately) won us over to the slim style first. And now you can't pry our hands off the $80 Logitech Illuminated Keyboard, whose subtle backlighting is swell for working after dark and whose typing feel is perhaps the best and sharpest we've ever enjoyed.

Oh, no, not this again: Ladies and gentlemen, get on your feet and put your hands together for Windows 7! It's at least ten months away! It's not even close to beta! And everybody's talking about it in the present tense and publishing reviews of it!

Yes, it's déjà vu with an unavailable product dominating the year's discussion, just as we let happen with Vista, even though everyone says it's not very important because we're living in Browser Cloud VirtuWorld now and Win 7 will be the last hurrah for traditional operating systems anyway. What are we going to call pre-announced cloud applications? Vaporware in a cloud? Rainware?

Product of the year: AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4000 series.

PC gamers are familiar with the title of Fastest and Greatest Graphics Card changing hands every few months, so it's nice but not surprising to hear that the Radeon HD 4870 and dual-GPU HD 4870 X2 are the Gamera and Godzilla of the DirectX 10 gaming world. The record-busting bandwidth of GDDR5 graphics memory and 800 stream processors are enough to make a Crysis or Call of Duty 4 champion drool.

But it's an unexpected pleasure that not only are the high-end 4870 and 4850 cards sensibly priced, but that AMD has let their R700 core architecture cascade all the way down to the lowest-budget, entry-level segment, first with the under-$100 Radeon HD 4650/4670 and then the under-$50 Radeon HD 4350 and 4550.

Sure, the bottom-rung GPUs' performance is puny compared to the models above them (having one-tenth as many stream processors will do that), but it's adequate for occasional gaming. And with features like Blu-ray playback and HDMI support in a graphics solution that draws only 20 watts, even the smallest, quietest, lowest-priced PCs can offer graphics that, to use the technical term, don't suck.

Combine that with sufficient system memory and dual-core CPU power, and you've got a phenomenon we've been dreaming of for decades: the end of the sucker-trap, sneer-worthy PC. The retail chains may be facing hard times, but they don't have any garbage on their shelves anymore.

Which is more than we can say for the LW&S Desk, with all these paper plates and plastic champagne glasses piled around. Even if you don't want to stay and help clean up, thanks for reading and our best wishes for a happy, cool-product-packed new year.

Eric Grevstad is JupiterWeb's executive editor for personal technology. A former editor in chief of Home Office Computing and editor of Computer Shopper, he's been covering PCs and peripherals since leaving the liberal arts for TRS-80 and Apple II magazines in the early '80s.